Flipswitch

Popularized by a slew of old school psychiatrists, most notably, Thomas Szasz, this is another oldie but goodie from the supporters of anti-psychology:  there is no such thing as mental illness.

As the argument goes, illness is a medical concept based on the biology as used in medical practices, practices that have the ability to confirm and deny the existence of illness based on very strict physical scientific tests.  Yet, psychology can identify conclusively no causative origin of “mental” illness in the body.  Psychologists can’t look at the brain and say, “that’s where the depression comes from. take that part away and people will go back to a nice happy state of being.”  Nope, it’s a sham!

Instead, say the anti-psychology crowd, what they’re doing is suggesting that “acceptable” behavior is what the body must be like when it’s working, and if someone misbehaves, it must be because their body is out of whack.  So, to the anti-psychologist crowd, what we’re talking about is not “illness” in the traditional sense, but “behavior” and the ordinary natural problems of life that occur.  And this goes all the way to even the most extreme of cases.  The mania of bipolar disorder?  Not an illness but an expressed choice.  The disorganization of word salad versions of schizophrenia?  Not a an illness but a bad way of dealing with the world.

So, to these people, there is no reason to stigmatize people as somehow “disordered” or “mentally ill” if their grief over the loss of a loved one lasts a long long time.  Grieving is normal even if it takes a long time.  There is no such thing as a mentally ill slave that want to escape the slave master.  And there is no such thing as depression clinically.  It’s just people understandably getting upset about natural life problems, even if they have a hard time expressing it.  Unfortunately, they say, we’ve chosen to use medical metaphors to describe behavior, metaphors that we have come to believe are real; falling for our own hype about being psychologically scientific with diagnosis.