Does ‘mental illness’ exist? I have taken as my title one of my least favourite questions. Although often posed to critics of psychiatric practice like myself, it actually makes very little sense. In unpicking it, I hope to show that we have better ways forward than the current, largely unchallenged understandings of emotional distress which do not reflect reality – either in terms of the evidence, or in terms of people’s lives.
Does ‘Mental Illness’ Exist?
The Problem with Psychiatric Diagnosis
Issue 83, 3rd December 2019
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John Flagg 11 January 2020
Possibly the best supporting evidence for this view is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (now in its 5th edition). This thick volume (from my forays into it) seems to define just about any and every minor deviation from a (what seems to me wholly imaginary) "norm" as a "mental disorder". My favorite example is Asperger's Syndrome which is broadly enough defined that just about anyone with mild introversion "qualifies". Thumbing through the "DSM" (as it's called) can be both a humorous and a depressing (uh-oh) exercise. My own "Bible" on the subject is Thomas Szasz's "The Myth of Mental Illness" published decades ago. So-called "diagnoses" like these hardly have the objectivity of their strictly medical counterparts and the proliferation of these diagnoses in the last couple of decades ought itself to be evidence that it's simply what psychotherapists and psychologists do to stay in business (so to speak).
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