If those seemingly external voices had persisted into adolescence and adulthood, I might have qualified for a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Instead, I became a garden-variety neurotic, assailed by self-recriminations that undermined my confidence and interfered with my happiness.
Are these two states of mind categorically distinct, or do they occupy different spots on a continuum of mental health? Is one properly classified as a brain disease requiring biomedical treatment while the other is a psychological condition amenable to talk therapy? Or are we talking about a difference in degree rather than kind? The renegade psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, a longtime Reason contributing editor, argued that "mental illness" was a metaphor that should not be taken literally. In his view, the patterns of speech and behavior that are seen as symptoms of schizophrenia, like less severe and more common disturbances of thought and emotion, could be traced to "problems in living" rather than an identifiable neurological lesion or biochemical defect.
Less radical critics of psychiatry's scientific pretensions tend to dismiss Szasz's take as implausible, clinically naive, and cruelly indifferent to the suffering of people diagnosed with schizophrenia. At the same time, they emphasize that psychiatry has never managed a satisfactory account of what schizophrenia is, let alone what causes it or why the treatments du jour can be expected to work. That ongoing failure with regard to schizophrenia, which Szasz called "the sacred symbol of psychiatry," epitomizes the field's broader crisis of credibility, which extends to the medicalization of nearly every human folly and foible.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der January 2023-Ausgabe von Reason magazine.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
Bereits Abonnent ? Anmelden
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der January 2023-Ausgabe von Reason magazine.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
Bereits Abonnent? Anmelden
'Smoking Opium Is Not Our Vice'
America’s first drug war was driven by xenophobia against chinese migrants.
THE LIBERTARIAN MIND OF DAVID BOAZ
Threats to freedom, Trump vs. Biden, and the wins libertarians can’t seem to acknowledge
DARE TO Fail
THERE’S NO SUCH thing as a universal millennial experience, but DARE comes close.
CULTURE WARRIOR IN CHIEF
THE MODERN PRESIDENCY IS A DIVIDER, NOT A UNITER. IT HAS BECOME FAR TOO POWERFUL TO BE ANYTHING ELSE.
Progress, Rediscovered
A NEW MOVEMENT PROMOTING SCIENTIFIC, TECHNOLOGICAL, AND ECONOMIC SOLUTIONS TO HUMANITY’S PROBLEMS EMERGES.
HOW CAPITALISM BEAT COMMUNISM IN VIETNAM
IT ONLY TOOK A GENERATION TO GO FROM RATION CARDS TO EXPORTING ELECTRONICS.
50 Years of D&D: You Can't Copyright Fun
THIS YEAR MARKS the 50th anniversary of the original edition of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), the granddaddy of tabletop role-playing games and one of the urtexts of nerd culture.
The Pupil Panopticon
BIG BROTHER—and Parent, and Teacher— are watching.
Congress Could Swipe Your Credit Reward Points
A PLOT TO kill credit card reward points has bipartisan buy-in, with lawmakers framing the effort as an attempt to curb stillstubborn inflation.
Regulators Killed a Lifeline for Roombas
IN JANUARY 2024, Amazon terminated its agreement to acquire iRobot, the company that manufactures the Roomba robot vacuum.