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TL;DRIf you believe schizophrenia exists I suppose you believe in unicorns too ? Mental illness obvously does not exist. Mental illness is a contradiction in terms and does not literally exist in objective reality but is a metaphor for behaviours that bother other people or the person themselves. Behaviours can't be diseases.
"The totality of true propositions is the whole of natural science. " --Ludwig Wittgenstein "The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"
The widespread belief that the scientist’s job is to reveal the secrets of nature is erroneous. Nature has no secrets; only persons do.
Secrecy implies agency, absent in nature. “Nature,” observed Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), “admits no lie.”1 Nature neither lies nor tells the truth. It has no secrets: “secrets” is the name we give to our ignorance of its workings. Because nature is not an agent, many of its workings can be understood by observation, reasoning, experiment, measurement, calculation, and truth-telling, the basic methods of science. Deception and divination are powerless to advance our understanding of natural phenomena; indeed, they preempt and prevent such understanding.
The human “sciences” are not merely unlike the physical sciences; they are, in many ways, opposites. Whereas nature neither lies nor tells the truth, persons habitually do both. This is why deception is a useful tool for persons such as detectives whose job is to ferret out other people’s secrets; why deception is a useful tool also for so-called experts—such as psychiatrists, psychologists, and politicians—whose ostensible job is to explain and predict certain human behaviors, especially behaviors some people consider dangerous or undesirable; and why such experts habitually deceive others and themselves.
The integrity of the natural scientific enterprise depends on truth-seeking and truth-speaking by individuals engaged in activities we call “scientific,” and on the scientific community’s commitment to expose and reject erroneous explanations and false “facts.” In contrast, the stability of religions and the ersatz faiths of psychiatry and the so-called behavioral sciences depends on the loyalty of its practitioners to established doctrines and institutions and the rejection of truth-telling as injurious to the welfare of the group that rests on it. Revealingly, we call revelations of the “secrets” of nature “discoveries” but call revelations of the secrets of powerful persons and institutions “exposés.”
Psychiatry—a term I use here to include psychoanalysis, psychology, and all the so-called mental health professions—is one the most important institutions of modern societies. The institution rests squarely on the postulate-proposition that “mental illness is an illness like any other illness.” That proposition is a lie. This lie is what makes malingering—the faking of disease—the great secret of psychiatry: a popular understanding that faking illness is a form of deception (and often self-deception) would destroy psychiatry. In this book I try to advance such understanding, and the constructive destruction it entails, by expanding on my thesis, first propounded more than a half century ago: the idea of mental illness and the apparatus of modern psychiatry as a medical specialty rest on the successful medicalization of malingering—that is, on the popular perception of behaviors called “mental illnesses” as bona fide medical diseases.
Understanding modern psychiatry—the historical forces and the complex economic, legal, political, and social principles and practices that support it—requires understanding the epistemology and sociology of faking in general and counterfeiting disease and disability in particular. Where there are fake diseases, there are healthy persons who pretend to be ill and deluded or dishonest doctors who diagnose and treat them. In 1976, protesting the official definition of psychiatry as the diagnosis and treatment of mental diseases, I proposed this definition:
The subject matter of psychiatry is neither minds nor mental diseases, but lies . . . [which] begin with the names of the participants in the transaction—the designation of one party as “patient” even though he is not ill, and of the other party as “therapist” even though he is not treating any illness. The lies continue with the deceptions that comprise the subject matter proper of the discipline—the psychiatric “diagnoses,” “prognoses,” “treatments,” and “follow-ups.” And they end with the lies that, like shadows, follow ex–mental patients through the rest of their lives—the records of denigrations called “depression,” “schizophrenia,” or whatnot and of imprisonments called “hospitalization.” Accordingly, if we wished to give psychiatry an honest name, we ought to call it “pseudology,” or the art and science of lies and lying.
A caricature? Yes. However, a good caricature portrays its subject more accurately than does a flattering portrait, nay self-deluded self-portrait.--Thomas Szasz
I have dedicated much of my professional life to a critique of the immorality inherent in the practices of the modern misbehavioral sciences (the term is Jacques Barzun’s), particularly psychiatry. I say inherent, because deception and coercion are intrinsic to the practices of the mental health professions. The core concept of psychiatry, mental illness qua medical disease, and the profession of psychiatry as a medical specialty based on it, rest on the medicalization of malingering.1--Thomas Szasz
The imitation of illness is memorably portrayed by Molière (1622–1673) in his famous comedy Le malade imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid). As created by Molière, the imaginary invalid, then called a “hypochondriac,” is someone who wants to be sick and be treated by others, especially doctors, as if he were sick. Telling Argan, the self-defined patient, that he looks well is considered rude in his household. Molière’s invalid confuses religion and medicine—imparting to medicine a sanctity that echoed the mysteries of religion—a confusion then obviously pregnant with comedic possibilities.2
Since those days, we in the West have undergone an astonishing cultural-perceptual change of which we seem largely, perhaps wholly, unaware. Today, medical healing is regarded as a form of applied science, the very opposite of faith healing, which is dismissed as hocus-pocus. Mutatis mutandis, the medical profession defines imaginary illnesses as real illnesses, in effect abolishing the notion of pretended illness. Malingering has become a disease “just as real” as melanoma.
Counterfeit art is forgery. Counterfeit testimony is perjury. But counterfeit illness is illness, “mental illness,” an illness officially decreed “an illness like any other.” The consequences of this policy—economic, legal, medical, moral, philosophical, political, and social—are momentous: counterfeit disability, counterfeit disease, counterfeit doctoring, and the bureaucracies and industries administering, adjudicating, and providing for them make up a substantial part of the national economies of modern Western societies.
According to classic, pathological-scientific criteria, disease is a product manufactured by the body, in the same sense that urine is. Diagnosis, in contrast, is a product manufactured by persons, in the same sense that works of art are. Charcot and Freud discarded the somatic pathological criterion of disease, destroying the empirical-rational basis for distinguishing real medical disorders of the body (diseases) from fake psychiatric disorders of the “mind” (nondiseases). Modern psychiatry is a gigantic edifice built on the poisoned ruins of this destruction.
Except for a few objectively identifiable brain diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, there are neither biological or chemical tests nor biopsy or necropsy findings for verifying or falsifying DSM diagnoses.
But I guess you got shizophrenia
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