Key research: Szasz

What issue does Szasz identify with mental illness being too medicalised?

• There’s too much emphasis on diagnosing and treating mental illness through medication.

• Psychiatrists hold incredible judgements- they alone have the ability to label, diagnose and treat the individual who is disturbed.

• Other, alternative, treatments are not seen as legitimate.

What does Szasz argue mental illness is?

• It’s a myth or a metaphor.

• He argues that while some mental illnesses might be discovered to have a liberty cause, this means they were never mental illnesses but instead undiagnosed physical illnesses.

• Instead, the term mental illness refers to the insanity of some people about the disturbing or socially unacceptable behaviour of others, which they label as mental illness.

What issue does Szasz identify with mental illness being too politicised?

• It is politicians who have decided that mental illness should be treated in the same way as physical illness, and therefore diagnosed and treated accordingly.

• Governments help decide what illnesses exist, and then control and regulate all funding for psychiatric treatments.

What issue does Szasz identify with psychiatric hospitals?

• They’ve become more like prisons with psychiatrists acting like jailers.

• Patients are imprisoned in the system, and denied their right to seek, accept or reject medical treatment in order to protect them from harming themselves or others.

• This takes away peoples power.

Why are all these approaches bad?

• It denies people responsibility for their wrongdoing- it suggests that people are inherently good until afflicted by mental illness, which causes them to act bad.

• This has important implications for the physical defence used in courts- people use mental illness as an excuse for bad behaviours.

• Szasz argues that this is not right and that some people are just bad people.