The Myth of Mental Illness

What Hacker News says

1. KourovskyJun 2024
   “The Myth of Mental illness” Thomas Szasz

   https://depts.washington.edu/psychres/wordpress/wp-content/u...

   thread
2. elbastiFeb 2019
   Szasz's "The Myth of Mental Illness" is one of those works which is completely and utterly misinterpreted simply because of the title.

   I don't have the book available at the moment, but in the introduction he says something to the effect of "I don't regret writing this book, but I regret calling it what I did, because people judge it without reading it."

   The gut-reaction to such a title is to think the writer is saying "depression doesn't exist" or "schizophrenia doesn't exist" or "manic depressives are lying."

   This isn't what he says in the book at all. Rather, his argument is more along the lines of:

   1. The word "illness" should be used to represent a cause-- and resolving the cause should cure the illness. Cancer, the flu, hyperparathyroidism--all map to causes.

   2. The conditions which we call mental illness don't have a knowable cause. They are symptoms which we pattern match against.

   3. Corollary: Illnesses should be hypothetically curable. There may be a cure for cancer. But there cannot be a "cure" for most "mental illnesses" because there is no shared, physical cause that underlies say, all cases of "bipolar disorder".

   3. So we shouldn't call them "illnesses". We should call them something else.

   Unfortunately that's about as much as I remember of his argument, but it's very different than the common accusation... And it also strikes me as accurate.

   The problem with naming things is that it makes them real. I think often the hacker news crowd forgets how ill-informed most of the world is, and the degree to which people crave certainty.

   When a person is told by a psychiatrists "Your 8 year has depression so we'll put her on X pill" or "You have bipolar type 2, so I recommend Y medicine", it has a certain finality.

   Most people don't think "The doctor is telling me that my behavior matches some patterns. That is it. She does not know why, and we may never know why, there may not even be a reason why. So we should think about what we can do to mitigate this."

   No. The we think "I've been diagnosed with a disease. (Sorry I'm being an a-hole|I won't go to your party|didn't get out of bed), I suffer from bipolar and there's no cure".

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3. peter_d_shermanJan 2019
   I've interviewed for a number of programmer jobs over the past 20 years; if there is one fact about them that should be engraved in stone, it is this: NO TWO EMPLOYERS USE THE SAME CRITERIA FOR EVALUATION OF WHETHER OR NOT TO HIRE YOU. Some employers won't use coding tests, some will, and of those that will, they'll all be different, with some the coding test will be 100% of the reason you get in or are rejected, with some it will be less, like 50% or 20% with the other percentage points going to the interview, what you say, past experience, if you connect, etc., etc.

   Advice: Don't sweat the coding questions if they exist, just do the best you can, try to explain the way you think, and realize that they don't count for 100% of the hire/no-hire decision at all of the companies that give them...

   Also, I like to point potential employers to Joel Spolsky's "The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing" https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guid...

   If they read it but disagree with it, I don't count it against them.

   If they read it and agree with it, that's a huge positive. I might be able to overlook other flaws in their software development process and take the job...

   If they don't read it, BIG RED FLAG!!! What else are they not going to listen to if/when you propose it? A job should be a two-way street with employees doing what they are told, but at the same time constantly proposing ways to improve their employers' processes! Even if employers do not accept those proposals (totally OK, they are the employer after all), they should at least have the common courtesy to READ anything reasonable, and RESPOND to those things, with the EXACT REASONS as to WHY those proposals are unacceptable!!!

   If a potential employer, pre-hire, won't read a web page you send them, and won't comment on it in such a way as to provide actionable intelligence one way, or the exact reason WHY on the other... that's a BIG RED FLAG!!!

   Also... for an alternative viewpoint on Mental Illness, you might wish to read "The Myth Of Mental Illness" by Dr. Thomas Szasz, M.D. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Mental_Illness

   "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results" -Albert Einstein

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4. jeffreyrogersAug 2018
   There's a book called The Myth of Mental Illness[0] that deals with this issue at length. The author argues that many forms of what we call "mental illness" are not real illnesses at all, but extreme preferences that prevent people from successfully integrating in society. He's not saying that these behaviors are healthy or natural, but he makes the argument that because these behaviors arise from differences in preferences we shouldn't make treatment compulsory, in part because doing so abridges a person's rights to liberty and also because it's hard to "cure" someone who doesn't see their behavior as problematic.

   If you're going to disagree with these arguments please realize that they are not my own. While I agree with much of what's in The Myth of Mental Illness, I don't agree with all of it. The above is obviously a very brief summary and leaves a lot unaddressed.

   [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Mental_Illness

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5. CWuestefeldMay 2009
   For deeper thoughts on the use of psychology as a means of control, see Thomas Szasz, especially The Myth of Mental Illness . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Mental_Illness

   While there surely exist some disorders rooted in physical defects of the brain, mental illnesses too often become a means of forcing people into conformity. Thus, the use of illicit drugs is evidence of mental illness and must be treated.

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6. danavarJan 2023
   There is a book that I’ve had recommended to me that posits a similar idea to what you’re saying - it’s called “The Myth of Mental Illness” - I have not read it yet, but will pass along the recommendation to you.
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