The Myth Of Mental Illness

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Is mental illness an illness? According to psychologists of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), mental illness is a state mind that impacts a person 's thinking, feeling or mood. Known to affect people ability to be in harmony in society with each other, mental illness is different from one person to another even people with the same diagnosis. On the other hand, Thomas S. Szasz author of “The Myth of Mental Illness” assert that “mental illness does not exist and that the notion of illness only applies to bodily abnormalities that can be proved by physical and chemical methods (Szasz, 2010). In nowadays societies with a better comprehension this phenomenon in the medical field, there is several reasons supporting the fact that mental …show more content…

Szasz’s on the matter of the non-existence of mental illness, is that an illness is usually definite as a disease or period of sickness affecting animal, plant or human beings by manifesting signs or symptoms that affect a specific location and is not simply a direct result of physical injury. While among the 297 mental disorders listed in the official publication of the American Psychiatric Association nowadays, there is no defining physical tests, any blood tests, or even laboratory tests of any kind that is conducted on the patient to determine their real state of mind. What psychologist usually do it is putting people into a particular box with a label on it on the basis of a mental disorder checklist wrote by their peers. For example the Ted talk named “Strange answer to the psychopath test” by the journalist John Ronson demonstrated that everybody in this world will fit to several categories of mental disorder according to the checklist, and lead us to the assumption of living inside of an insane word where we are all sick and more importantly where being mental ill is the norm. Or even lead to the fact that those disorders do not exist at all. Thomas S. Szasz sustains the point that because the medical diagnosis relies on the judgment of a physician judgment and correlates with the demonstration of a corresponding physiochemical disorder all mental illness case should be treated like that to affirm their veracity. Therefore, it is not because some people act differently that they should be label on a non-sense basis mental

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