A Defence of Szasz’s ‘The Myth of Mental Illness’ and Its Relevance to Modern Mental Healthcare
This paper surrounds the discussion of Szasz’s ideas regarding mental disorders from his publication ‘The Myth of Mental Illness’. Not only are these ideas relevant today due to the mind-brain problem in psychiatry not being resolved, leading to varying ideas about the best practice in mental psychiatry, but also because of similar issues to those which inspired Szasz to suggest a new way to understand mental disorders still affecting mental healthcare service users today. Therefore, if Szasz’s ideas can be proved as defensible against their most common critiques, I claim they could be of use to improve modern mental healthcare. Specifically, I use hermeneutics to uniquely criticise Graham’s argument from the ‘In/Of’ Distinction, iterations of which have commonly been used to disprove Szasz’s ideas. This critique not only disproves that the ‘In/Of’ Distinction is enough to criticise Szasz, but also demonstrates the impact that our sociocultural context has on our expectations relating to mental disorders. I then conclude that, due to failures in mental healthcare existing today that are similar to those present at the time of Szasz’s writing, ideas from ‘The Myth of Mental Illness’ being defensible against their two main critiques, as well as hermeneutics re-enforcing Szasz’s claims relating to the impact of an individual’s background and experiences on mental disorders, Szasz’s argument cannot sufficiently be dismissed. Therefore, ideas from ‘The Myth of Mental Illness’, along with key points from my novel argument of the ‘In/Of’ Distinction through the consideration of hermeneutics could potentially be used to tackle issues facing modern mental healthcare.
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