So I was talking to my new therapist the other day and he said I might find the work of Thomas Szasz, a psychiatry prof at SUNY, interesting, so I looked him up on Wikipedia (can't link to it because I'm a new member still, just google "Thomas Szasz"

I know his arguments might be very unpopular on a psych board but I have to admit they make a lot of sense. Describing behavior as an "illness" or a "disease" doesn't make any sense. A disease is something that "must demonstrate pathology on a cellular or molecular level", a disease is something you have, not something you do.

From the Wiki page:

"A genuine disease must also be found on the autopsy table (not merely in the living person) and meet pathological definition instead of being voted into existence by members of the American Psychiatric Association. "Mental illnesses" are really problems in living. They are often "like a" disease, argues Szasz, which makes the medical metaphor understandable, but in no way validates it as an accurate description or explanation. Psychiatry is a pseudo-science that parodies medicine by using medical sounding words invented especially over the last 100 years. To be clear, heart break and heart attack, or spring fever and typhoid fever belong to two completely different logical categories, and treating one as the other constitutes a category error, that is, a myth. Psychiatrists are the successors of "soul doctors", priests who dealt and deal with the spiritual conundrums, dilemmas, and vexations — the "problems in living" — that have troubled people forever."

I've been told I have a chemical imbalance in my brain that results in depression. That sounds logical, but no one can measure the levels of neurotransmitters in the synaptic gaps between my neurons, so they (doctors) come to this conclusion by deduction. Give a drug that inhibits the re-uptake of one neurotransmitter and see if she feels better. If so, that must be it. Okay. I can live with that. Maybe someday they'll be able to operationalize this theory more scientifically, but now the possibility that I have "borderline personality disorder" is something different. That's not neurotransmitters, that's learned behavior and I can do this thing called Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) to learn other ways of thinking and behaving. I'm okay with that too (in fact I like it better than the idea of messing around semi-haphazardly with my natural brain chemistry).

I'm not saying that different levels of different neurotransmitters in your brain don't result in people feeling depressed, manic or whatever. And I'm not saying that coping mechanisms/behaviors that we developed as children in response to specific situations in our childhoods don't sometimes become un-helpful as behaviors when we are adults... but there is something to this guy's argument that when we view these things as "diseases" of the "mind" (brain) that can be "cured" there are all sorts of unpleasant ramifications ranging from patronizing and disempowering patients by doctors to social ostracization and victimization by society in general.

(Szasz also talks a lot about how the "disease" perspective decimates individual liberty and the right of people to decide various things for themselves such as the right to end one's own life).

Just to be clear, he's not against psychiatry or against any kind of therapy that people willingly undertake, just against the characterization of these things as "disease" and against any kind of coerced treatment such as forced hospitalization etc.

So I was just wondering what others' thoughts are on his ideas and if anyone has read any of his books.