One of the positions taken by Thomas Szasz in his anti-psychiatry movement:

The myth of mental illness: It is a medical metaphor to describe a behavioral disorder, such as schizophrenia, as an “illness” or “disease”. Szasz wrote: “If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic.”While people behave and think in ways that are very disturbing, this does not mean they have a disease. To Szasz, people with mental illness have a “fake disease,” and these “scientific categories” are in fact used for power controls. Schizophrenia is “the sacred symbol of psychiatry” and, according to Szasz, simply does not exist. To be a true disease, the entity must somehow be capable of being approached, measured, or tested in scientific fashion. According to Szasz, disease must be found on the autopsy table and meet pathological definition instead of being voted into existence by members of the American Psychiatric Association. Mental illnesses are “like a” disease, argues Szasz, putting mental illness in a semantic metaphorical language arts category. Psychiatry is a pseudo-science that parodies medicine by using medical sounding words invented over the last 100 years. To be clear, heart break and heart attack belong to two completely different categories. Psychiatrists are but “soul doctors”, the successors of priests, who deal with the spiritual “problems in living” that have troubled people forever. Psychiatry, through various Mental Health Acts has become the secular state religion according to Thomas Szasz. It is a social control system, which disguises itself under the claims of scientificity. The notion that biological psychiatry is a real science or a genuine branch of medicine has been challenged by other critics as well, such as Michel Foucault in Madness and Civilization (1961).

Here’s an example of clarity through technology. You get the sense that Szasz’s ideas could be tested with modern technology, and here’s a specific example from the full text of his essay:

The assumption is made that some neurological defect, perhaps a very subtle one, will ultimately be found for all the disorders of thinking and behavior. Many contemporary psychiatrists, physicians, and other scientists hold this view. This position implies that people cannot have troubles — expressed in what are now called “mental illnesses” — because of differences in personal needs, opinions, social aspirations, values, and so on. All problems in living are attributed to physicochemical processes which in due time will be discovered by medical research.

A lot of these psychochemical processes are much better understood now, and you actually can treat “mental illnesses” as chemical imbalances in the brain. I think there’s still plenty of questions raised by Szasz left unanswered, though.

Ahhh… I used to surf Wikipedia a lot more, and I was very happy to have the chance to do it today.

Watched the movie The Machinist last night, and enjoyed it a lot. I am fascinated by explorations of this thing called “sanity.”

I was led to the Wikipedia entry quoted above through the entry on Frank Herbert. I think I’m going to have to pick up a bunch of his novels on my next trip home. I’m reading The Jesus Incident now and really enjoying it, but I need to read the prequel Destination: Void to truly appreciate it, and I also want to tackle the entire Dune series. (You got some old books for me, Dad?)