Notes on The Myth of Mental Illness, by Thomas Szasz

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It is this wiki-authors understanding that Szasz himself is a psychiatrist.

views from 1974 may not all apply to todays realities.

from the revised edition, reprinted 2003

notes are approximations of the understandings and approximate summations by these wiki authors.

original copyright and publication 1974

psychiatry = pseudoscience pg. 1

psychiatry concerns itself with the study of personal conduct - p 8

Quotes:

"Indeed, we are well along the road of having purchased superiority and power over patients at the cost of scientifict self-sterilization and imminent professional self-destruction."

notes on the summary

• p 267 - on

mental illness is a metaphor --

the body can only be sick - the mind is not the body - so the mind cannot be sick - .. .something like this - - the mind is intangible - - - and therefore cannot be sick..... hmm...

quote

quoted under FAIR USE if necessary and possible

"psychiatric diagnoses are stigmitizing labels... and applied to persons whose behavior annoys or offends others"

insanity plea "corrupts" the law

"psychiatric interventions... are crimes against humanity" - somewhat of an extreme view perhaps.... p268

From this writers memory

psychiatry is the MEDICALIZATION of /social, ethical and... moral/ problems. - - - - - - - what this writer has possibly extrapolated is that - it is strucural problems that we then percieve socially as mental illness - - - - we can see eachother and ourselves differently by changing structural and environmental variables - - - - - - that is just a theory, perhaps.... hmmm..........

See also

Related areas of psychology which might include study of these sorts of concepts and possibly related concepts might include:

• Community psychology
• Critical psychology
• Critical psychiatry
• Szaszian studies