Mon. 12/06/18 20:24 EDT
.post #172
[url=Game Theory, self interest, and praxeology - #4 by Vladimir_Ulyanov]
Transcript of Dr. Wiseman’s talk about Dr. Thomas Szasz
Up until 2:50 of part 1, Wiseman does a tolerable job of representing some of Szasz’s ideas.
But then, at 3:20, Wiseman says this:
Wiseman’s vista doesn’t extend very far, then. Wiseman’s ignorant statement suggests to me that he hasn’t even read one of Szasz’s books, let alone all thirty-five of them. By trying to trivialize something he hasn’t even taken the time or trouble to understand, he tells us more about his own lack of knowledge than he does about Szasz’s ideas.
Szasz neither denies nor affirms “psychiatric symptoms.”
Szasz doesn’t couch discussion of behavior in medical terminology.
What Szasz denies is that behaviors labelled “psychiatric symptoms” are, in fact, symptoms. Psychiatrists (like Wiseman) use medical-sounding language (“diagnose,” “symptom,” “disorder,” “treat,” “medicate”) to create the impression that behavior is illness/disease or somehow the province of medicine/doctoring.
Not only does Wiseman misunderstand what Szasz says, he mispronounces Szasz’s name (and also Descartes’s name). It underscores a fundamental lack of scholarship concerning the subject on which he pontificates.
[url=Game Theory, self interest, and praxeology - #9 by Vladimir_Ulyanov]
Vladimir, there is no “Szasz’s definition of mental illness.”
Szasz does not attempt to define “mental illness.”
Szasz recognizes that some people have strange ways of behaving, but rejects the idea that such behavior is illness, “mental” or otherwise. Behavior can never be illness (or, for that matter, health); the two things are entirely and categorically different.
Wiseman’s actual words are “It’s an entirely circular logic.” But has Wiseman “showed” this, or merely asserted it? And has Wiseman “showed” that the behavior he calls “mental illness” is, in fact, illness, or has he merely assumed it? Has he questioned this assumption? Can Wiseman tell me how “the mind,” which is just a concept, an abstraction, can possibly be “ill”?
Illness is an affliction of the body; illness does not, indeed can not, “afflict” concepts and abstractions like “the mind.”