Thomas Szasz on Psychiatry

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?