[youtube:Qj7GmeSAxXo]
Do you think he’s out of his mind or does he make some very good points? I tend to agree with him.
“Labling a child as mentally ill, is stigmatization, not dianosis.”
Labling people is sucky, so I enjoyed the doctor.
I had to withdraw my son from school because they wanted to send him to a shrink, and it’s slavery, etc. He was just dancing in line and singing, and defending the meek, he’s big, with a big heart.
Everybody can be defined as anti-social in some way or another. If one does not admit to being an individual, he enslaves himself to morons.
cool videos!!!
His premise that behaviors are not diseases makes perfect sense. In the absence of any objective medical evidence, much of contemporary psychiatric diagnosis, particularly as it relates to children, is kind of half-baked at best. Especially in the case of “recently discovered” (or invented out of thin air, in my view) things such as ADD. It seems like an excuse to put people on drugs and through theraputic programs. I’m willing to grant that a certain number of diseases of the brain have been discovered (ones that constitute an actual malfunction of the brain), but a lot of the ones that have popped up only in recent years warrant severe doubt.
Some will try to enforce upon folks that, if they be deemed nutty, than they are a threat to others.
I want to reply unless they go around makin’ threats, don’t worry. I don’t know if society can even prevent any crime. I think most criminals think they can get away with it, or go as far as, if not than - perished I will be.
I feel some of these supposed doctors actually think they are in aid.
What a joke that - it must be the societies fault that people go and ball up.
Well part of the problem is that mere eccentricity or behaviors outside of “the norm” are erroneously equated to mental illness. If your child is eccentric, they may very well be a genius, not a sociopath. What some psychiatrists are labeling as a “mental handicap” may actually be a blessing. I just don’t trust the shrinks. I never have. Too many of them are taking advantage of their position as a means to control others and keep the medical-industrial-complex charade going.
I don’t know much about Szasz or psychiatry. From what I have heard I’d tend to agree with him. Apparently a book is available on amazon in which he confronts his critics.
I’m with you Brainpolice. The idea of an illness which is physically undefinable is not a disease. I think it mental illness has come out of biological determinist thinking, denying free will, which removes the responsibility from ones actions. I too believe “mental illness” is also you used to drug up people you don’t like and potentially to your political enemies. I wait for the day that Anarchists, or even small government types, are sectioned because they are mentally ill and need therefore to do more drugs than Lemmy from Motorhead.
Ha. Nothing Lemmy does will ever remote that giant wart from his face. It’s his trademark.
Great video. You may found interesting this aritcle of Bryan Kaplan, where he’s trying top look at Szaszian arguments with an “economist’s eyes” :
I did.
Heh, I replied to the other thread without noticing this one. You should read the Myth of Mental Ilness. If you’re short on time you can read some of his shorter work on http://www.szasz.com/.
If you’re too short on time to go there, his argument is extremely basic and extremely logical. To accurately define a disease, you need to be able to prove empirically that a specific bodily lesion is causing the ailment. That’s it. Psychiatry prefers to assert the existence of illnesses and then theorize on what causes them, and then theorize cures for these theoretical diseases that are completely imagined.
He objects to the idea that “Mental Illness” is a seperate category of disease with different standards of diagnosis.
I don’t know how convinced I am that no mental diseases exist, but at the same time I think the science has pretty well established that certain brain functions do in fact cause people to act in certain ways.
No, it is not a blanket statement that brain-affecting diseases don’t exist - just look at a disease like syphillus. Read the book, the science isn’t well established at all.
Abberant behavior is the result of acting on unusual subjective preferences, and cannot be caused by a brain abnormality.
For example, if a person lies about in a coma, they are just being extremely lazy and on a hunger strike, not really mentally diseased.
Or if a child is faliling their limbs violently, they must be having a temper tantrum, not having a seizure.
Also, psychotherapy and psychiatric drugs can’t possibly have an effect on behavior. Only human willpower can decide behavior.
Sorry for the sarcasm, but I think the brain is a complex and poorly understood organ, it can certainly be diseased and cause behaviorial problems, and diagnosing it or treating it with psychiatric/psychological means should be an available choice to the public. I have doubts that more objective things like blood tests and MRI’s can pinpoint problems in the brain in a cost effective way, if at all.
I think Szasz is just making fun of the fact that psychology is not a hard science. I think this fact is true, but irrelevant. We can’t deterministically calculate what a given person will due based on the objective state of their brain. It’s just like how praxeology is not a hard science, and an omiscient being who could calculate simulations of human thought might be able to dispense with it. But praxeology is the best foundation from a practical point of view, as Mises explains in Human Action.
It’s easy to make statements like that if you never actually bother reading the material. Please at least attempt to back up your wildly inaccurate characterizations with citations.
Right, this explaination makes perfect sense to me. As you clarify above, it is not the claim that brain diseases don’t exist, it’s the claim that the bulk of contemporary psychiatric diagnosis do not constitute brain diseases and therefore are imaginary diseases made up to explain away undesired behaviors and put people on drugs.
Let’s not forget that these people are also empowered to incarcerate people for exhibiting aberrant behavior.
My own mother had me kidnapped when I was 15 to be sent to what was essentailly a re-education camp. I managed to get out after three days thanks to a frenzied one-man letter-writing campaign. It’s enormously easy to deprive someone of their freedom using the medical-industrial complex. No one even bothered to evaluate me - two big men woke me up one morning and forced me onto a plane.
But what about…
But what if…
Oh… OK. [8-)]
Argue from the text and then I will be happy to respond in depth. I’m not going to waste my time knocking down straw men.
See here for an incredibly perverse result of “psychiatry”.
A man jumps off a of a fourth floor balcony with his two kids; one dies and the other survives. He gets of with murder because he is “incapable”.
Argue from the text and then I will be happy to respond in depth. I’m not going to waste my time knocking down straw men.
Wow, I must have struck a nerve.
See here for an incredibly perverse result of “psychiatry”.
man jumps off a of a fourth floor balcony with his two kids; one dies and the other survives. He gets of with murder because he is “incapable”.
What’s perverse? That a mentally ill person is going to receive treatment, rather than punishment?
Oops, I forgot. Mental illnesses don’t appear on X-rays, and thus can’t possibly exist.
He objects to the idea that “Mental Illness” is a seperate category of disease with different standards of diagnosis.
Yeah, why should mental illness be any more difficult to diagnose than any other disease?
Heart - pumps blood
Lung - absorbs oxygen
Brain - responsible for thought, memory, perception, emotion, speech, motor control, logic, planning, behavior, etc.
To accurately define a disease, you need to be able to prove empirically that a specific bodily lesion is causing the ailment.
That’s a perfectly acceptable definition of disease. Perhaps, in cases of profound mental illness where no lesions are present we shall call them “uneases”.
Is vitamin deficiency, e.g. beriberi, a disease? Or do you need lesions to form first before getting diagnosed?