Analysis Of The Myth Of Mental Illness By Thomas Szasz

In 1950, Hungarian-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Thomas Szasz published an article titled, The Myth of Mental Illness and positioned that mental illness is a myth. He claimed that mental illnesses are fictitious illnesses thus argued that the main uses to which the concept of mental illness has been put has outlived whatever usefulness it might have had. He asked “What is meant when it is asserted that someone is mentally ill” and developed an answer to this question. In the following paragraphs, I will share that response and describe what I believe is the sense and the nonsense of Szasz’s view.
As mentioned above, Thomas Szasz made some claims in his article on the phenomenon of mental illness that some might categorize as “going …show more content…
We now have a better understanding of mental illness, we know for a fact that it is a disease, we have measures on how to treat it, who should pay for it, and the list goes on. But the controversy surrounding the topic of being mentally ill in our time has to do with questions such as how should society view persons judged to be mentally ill? Some believe, mentally ill people should be held responsible for their actions, whereas others believed that their caregivers should be held responsible for actions for mentally ill people. Take for example, cases of gun control and mass shooting in America. If the shooter gets caught alive, and get diagnosed as being mentally ill, some people still blame them for their actions, whereas others blame their parents, or their psychiatrist and so on and so forth. Either way the treatment differ, the way authorities approach the case is different and this is what Szasz had a problem with: It seems as though people are using mental illness to avoid responsibility for their …show more content…
And as a member of the Christian Reformed denomination, I want to articulate on his ideas and thereby recognized that indeed there is a problem in the living. Some people are not born being mentally ill, instead, they are later diagnosed with it later in their lifetime due to problems in the living. So, I am calling on our societies to be considerate and understanding towards this individual. I am not advocating that they should be free of whatever they choose to do, but that we as societies take measure to protect them at all cost because they are part of us, and we are in a broken world.
So the question then becomes how much and/or in what way should persons with an emotional disorder be held responsible for their condition? And I must say, for me, there is a lot of gray areas so I will leave it to “it depends ‘on the situation. A lot of things needs to be analyzed for me to conclude in what ways exactly should a person with a emotional disorder be held responsible for their condition because I want to be empathetic yet I would also like to see justice fall