Thomas Szasz on The Myth of Mental Illness
Get the full video at: https://www.psychotherapy.net/video/szasz-myth-of-mental-illness
Psychiatrist and social critic Thomas Szasz unsettled the psychiatric establishment in the 1960’s, challenging its foundational notions around normalcy, mental illness and treatment. By watching this pair of riveting interviews, Dr. Szasz will challenge you to explore and question your own cherished beliefs around diagnosis, psychotherapy and freedom; deepening your empathy for even the most challenging clients.’
#mentalhealth #mentalillness #mentalhealthawareness #mentalhealthmatters
31 Comments
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While not in total agreement with Dr Szasz he has a valid argument. Another question is what help if any is owed to self-destructive people?
I can believe if people say SOME mental illnesses exist but not all.
Especially schizophrenia, it is not a real mental illness. Why do I say so? Mental health workers will gang up and attack the patient and when the patient defends himself/herself they accuse the patient of being overly defensive and overly paranoid after which the Psychiatrist will misdiagnose the poor person with schizophrenia. I have witness it
happen far too many times.
Schizophrenia is a made up fake mental disorder that Mental Health workers will use as an excuse to attack people when they can’t find anything wrong with the person.
So agree with this.
Molestation : seniors unconnected, alone.
Amen. We are a nation of prisoners being experimented upon.
I heard Alan Watts mention Thomas Szasz a couple of times, so I bought a couple of his books, Thomas's books.
So humans invented mental conditions along with the signs to diagnose them for all mental health disorders/illnesses/conditions. They don't actually exist even though people who don't know what is wrong with them are feeling and displaying symptoms that warrant a diagnosis of a specific mental condition? Did I get that right? Every psychotic, sociopath etc. isn't really sick? It's just a myth. Did I get that right?
Great Szasz, he destroyed the psychiatry’s reign of terror.
In Italy we have some Antipsichiatry activists. Me too, of course 😎
I disagree
0:31
"You will own nothing and you will be happy." – Klaus Schwab
"Freedom gives you the opportunity to be unhappy. And not to be molested for it." …Thomas Szasz.
People like Jung and other sick fucks with degrees collaborated in making this delusion
People always call me crazy when they realise I don't like them. Just a way of discrediting people.
Dying is illegal
psychiatry has become a sham full of fake diagnosis for profit, avoiding accountability, while society crumbles.
Mental illness is everywhere. Just look at Trump supporters.
If this guy is saying mental illness doesn't exist he is just a loon. Psychotherapy is nonsense The Weeknd physically probe and diagnose illnesses like schizophrenia exist and have objective proof they work.
Who would want "freedom" the way Szasz defines it? Either way, one is unhappy but "free"–or one is unhappy but not free!
you can go to every psychiatrist and get a different diagnosis based on the psychiatrist perspective..
AMEN!
If this 1:42 is a true representation of Szasz, he was a deluded human being with an oversimplistic notion of the nature of human beings! His lack of an appreciation of how we integrate our experience into a model of how the world works and therefore the potential for developing suboptimal models which result in unnecessary misery, which would not even consider the burden of chronic stress on the CNS as a cause of corrupted cognitive processing, is so profound that his name and views are simply idiocy and the product of someone with a significant mental illness himself. For this defensiveness against psychiatry represents his own discomfort with an examination of himself and not a truly objective examination of the field.
I can't believe how much have been said in under two minutes. What the hell …
Psychiatry makes no sense, so some people are evil because…. a pre condition, and how they got that consition? I don’t know, that will be 500 dollars.
Vipassana is the best therapy for me.
This man seems full of sh*t. Sorry my severe intrusive thoughts form OCD are a debilitating illness. Only a stupid, vain man, a shock jockey (as his use of the word molestation shows, how disrespectful to the millions that have actually had that happen to them) fully concerned only with his own fame would deny that there are mental illnesses.
We can literally look at brain scans of people with adhd and ocd and see that their brains function differently. We can modify their thought process with drugs.
In short what an idiot. What a disgusting and unprofessional thing to present, and the fact that Jordan Peterson, who is currently having his license removed from him for speaking bs from his pulpit, only increases my distaste.
If I could put you in my head for 5 minutes you would never agree with this man. Until then maybe you can look at the objective evidence such as brain scans.
Psychiatry defiles and dehumanizes the very essence of humanity. According to Psychiatrist Dr. Peter Breggin psychotropic drugs work by destroying aspects of the 🧠 brain.
Does he want to stop people from getting proper help , medication? Cause it seems like it. Mental Illness is real whether its physical or spiritual IMO.
But if the brain is an organ, why can’t it malfunction the way a heart or liver might? Maybe depression is a kind of headache. Or, why will mourning always be perfect with a precise and measured beginning and end that arises organically from the brain and is health sustaining? Why can’t the mechanism that responds to sadnesses perform poorly or need help being set into place like a cast might a broken bone?
Mental illness is real, is organic, needs medication unless social supports can indeed be used and then removed. It’s like saying some broken bones need cement, and others can heal with removable pins.
How on earth is mental illness a myth? The brain is a physical organ, it can malfunction like any other organ. We know there's a genetic component to things like bipolar and schizophrenia. And nobody can tell me that seeing and hearing things that are not their, paranoid delusions and violent mood swings for no external reason are not signs of something deeply wrong, ie an illness, or somehow invented into existence by society.
I agree with some of what he asserts, but it is an overgeneralization to say that all cases of people receiving drugs from the psychiatric profession are tyranny or exploitation. There are many people who have benefited from reasonable amounts of medicine being part of their care. The problem is when people don't have control over the process; when they cede their autonomy over to the doctors, therapists and clinics. They become passive recipients of pharmaceuticals.
And some patients who fall into that do so because they want an instant cure. They don't understand that pharmaceuticals are only to help a person take the edge off their problems so they can start to work on them. The dependence on medicines, or on talk therapy itself, may become the latest pathology or bad habit — iow, just a new manifestation of their original problem that brought them to therapy.
But the whole of the therapy and psychiatry realms cannot be judged in a lump sum on this issue. it is the process that determines whether psychiatry is good or oppressive.
And I agree that until about the mid-1900s we had no inclination to define ourselves as unhappy to the point where we'd turn to psychiatry or drugs. We didn't divide life into happy/unhappy.
But what his criticism is not taking into account is that in those old days, we also had a 1/3 to 1/2 infant mortality rate. And it was just accepted that during the construction of a tall building, four or five workers would die. When you bought food, there was a serious chance it could poison you; that was considered an accepted risk.
The higher emphasis in the last 50 years on being happy is by no means just the result of a pharma conspiracy. It is also because we have higher expectations that we deserve to be well off.