Tagged: mental illness

The Myths of Mental Illness: A Thomas Szasz Appreciation Revisited

In 2018, reacting in part to an endless litany of cases over the years of university students telling me, usually in matter-of-fact tones, that they and/or their friends had been prescribed brain-altering psychological drugs to treat depression, anxiety, sleep problems, or what have you, I finally decided to sit down and sort out in writing some of my various frustrations at this mass...

Depressing News, or Just a Chemical Imbalance?

A psychiatrist named Mark Horowitz is making waves these days by publishing research indicating that there is in fact no substantial scientific evidence showing that ordinary human depression, for which hundreds of millions of people around the world are taking powerful prescription medication, has any connection to the supposed chemical imbalance in the brain for which the standard “antidepressant” medicine is alleged to...

Limbo’s Greatest Hits: #6

There has been a lot of careless banter lately about the mental health of various American politicians and their supporters. From Donald Trump to Joe Biden, and from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” to “progressivism is a mental illness,” opportunists of the left and right, including even some professional psychologists on both sides, have taken to exploiting the language of mental health, or rather mental...

The Myths of Mental Illness: A Thomas Szasz Appreciation, Part Two

The fantasy that someday everything we now call “mind” or “soul” will be explained by physical causation is the crux of the modern scientific materialist dream, and means nothing less, in theory and in practice, than the literal annihilation of the human race as a species of living beings who experience and think.

The Myths of Mental Illness: A Thomas Szasz Appreciation (Part One)

The most humbling honor of being a teacher — I mean a teacher, not just a salaried “education worker” — is earning the trust of variously perplexed, abnormal souls who have intuited that they need some extraordinary help with their self-understanding or their relationship to the world around them, and have come to believe that you might be able to provide that help....

Trump Derangement Syndrome, Collectivism, and Lynch Mobs

One of the most childish, irresponsible, and profoundly anti-rational argumentative techniques is to accuse your opponent of a mental disorder. Childish because it is a leading technique of the schoolyard (“Retard!” “Fag!”); irresponsible because it is merely an attempt to harm your opponent, rather than to persuade or critique him; anti-rational because it is designed precisely to evade or short-circuit reason and logic....

Guns and the Mental Illness Slippery Slope

Once again, we are seeing the danger of Americans having placed the power of the presidency in the hands of a man without any guiding moral or political philosophy beyond “What will make them love me?” According to Right Scoop, Trump is apparently now open to banning the sale of firearms to people with a “mental illness.” Mental illness is a category that,...