All Posts Tagged With: "mental illness"

Taxing for Therapy

The Marxian credo, “From each according to his
abilities, to each according to his needs,” is the
moral foundation of the progressive tax policies
of modern capitalist societies. The psychiatric credo,
“From each producer according to his income, to each
psychiatric parasite according to his cunning,” amplifies
that creed and garbs it in the mantle of therapy.

1Oct2005 | | 1 comment | Continued

Idiots, Infants and the Insane: Mental Illness and Legal Incompetence

In principle, mental patents are considered competent, free to accept or refuse treatment. In practice, they are often treated as if they were incompetent, forced to submit to treatment in their own best interest. This conflation of mental illness and legal incompetence—and the concomitant transformation of the mental patient in the community into the (potential [...]

1Jul2005 | | 1 comment | Continued

College Suicide: Caveat Vendor

Nulla poena sine lege (no penalty without law). The rule that a person cannot be penalized for doing something that is not prohibited by law has long been viewed as a fundamental principle of free societies. American criminal law does not prohibit suicide. De jure, it is legal to kill yourself. De facto, if you [...]

1May2005 | | 1 comment | Continued

Psychiatric Services

The standard political-philosophical justification for the state is the need of the community for protection from criminals at home and enemies abroad. The community is now believed to be threatened by another group as well: the mentally disordered. Liberals and conservatives take for granted that coercing these persons is also the duty of the government. [...]

1Oct2004 | | 0 comments | Continued

House of Aces

Almost 50 years have passed since I first proposed that the concept of mental illness and the profession of psychiatry rest on fictitious foundations. “Mental illnesses” (henceforth without scare quotes) are behaviors, not diseases. Psychiatry is religion, rhetoric, and repression, not medicine. The basis for understanding mental illness lies in semiotics (the study of signs [...]

1Jul2004 | | 0 comments | Continued

On Autogenic Diseases

Our bodies are physico-chemical machines. When the function of the machine deviates from what is generally considered normal and if we regard the deviation as harmful and unwanted, we call the event or process a “disease.” Like all physical-chemical events, diseases have causes, which physicians call “etiology.” The familiar causes of disease are pathogenic microbes, [...]

1May2004 | | 2 comments | Continued

Book Reviews – May 2003

The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power by Max Boot Basic Books • 2002 • 448 pages • $30.00 hardcover; $16.00 paperback Reviewed by Ivan Eland Max Boot provides a thorough and relatively candid history of the U.S. government’s involvement in small wars. The section of the book on [...]

1May2003 | | 0 comments | Continued

Parity or Prevarication?

In my March 2002 column I showed that the advocates of parity for mental illness are engaged in a campaign of calculated falsehoods. Their claim that mental diseases are brain diseases is a lie. The last thing the mental-health zealots want is parity in the legal treatment of mental patients and medical patients. Despite being [...]

1Mar2003 | | 0 comments | Continued

Straight Talk about Suicide

Suicide–like accident, illness, death, poverty, persecution, and war–has always been with us and has always been regarded as a part of life. Believing that a person’s life belongs to God, not himself, the Jews declared it to be a grievous sin, and Christians and Muslims followed suit. Enlightenment thought did not overtly repudiate this view. [...]

1Sep2002 | | 0 comments | Continued

Was the Beautiful Mind Sick?

A Beautiful Mind has economics as its background. The foreground is reserved for mental illness and its treatment. As the movie tells the story, John Nash, a brilliant mathematician who arrogantly alienates the people around him, suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, which in his case has him hallucinating about a nonexistent roommate and a government intelligence [...]

1Aug2002 | | 1 comment | Continued

Insanity and Intolerance

In the Age of Faith, the Church, viewed as having been established by Christ, was perceived as a perfect society. Hence, it was reasonable that it be empowered to make laws and inflict penalties for their violation, which were viewed as striking at her very life, the unity of belief. The result was the concept [...]

1Jul2002 | | 1 comment | Continued

Capital Letters

What Is “Mental Illness”? To the Editor: [The March column opposing insurance parity for psychiatric treatment by] Thomas Szasz . . . shocked and disappointed me. . . . Any close relative (myself included) of a person who was formerly seriously mentally ill—with all the unwanted auditory and visual cacophony—and was returned to normal rational [...]

1Jul2002 | | 0 comments | Continued

Alaskan Courtesy

*Mary Pemberton, “Alaska Court: Mentally ill can keep concealed weapons,” Associated Press, January 11, 2002. All quotes are from this report. Alaska is most often thought of as simply a snow-covered tundra far to our north. Rarely do Americans find themselves looking to that Arctic wilderness for reason to celebrate a renewed sense of personal [...]

1Jun2002 | | 3 comments | Continued

No Responsibility, No Freedom

Andrea Yates was not the only person whose free will was on trial last winter. Thus the Yates murder case underscores the affront represented by the psychiatric (and any other reductionist-positivist) worldview. She drowned her five young children in a bathtub last year and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. (The jury nevertheless convicted [...]

1Jun2002 | | 1 comment | Continued

Parity for Mental Illness, Disparity for Mental Patients

By definition, diseases are afflictions of the body. Hence, afflictions of the mind, called “mental illnesses,” are not real diseases. Organized psychiatry deals with that embarrassing fact by reasserting its age-old claim that “mental illnesses” are brain diseases and enlisting the power of the state to turn fiction into fact. In October 2001 the Senate [...]

1Mar2002 | | 1 comment | Continued

Mental Illness: Psychiatry’s Phlogiston

“The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” —Gilbert K. Chesterton In physics the same laws are used to explain why airplanes fly and why they crash. In medicine the same principles are used to explain why people live and [...]

1Nov2001 | | 0 comments | Continued

The Bought Mind

Why did the Founders not mention money, that is, the government’s use of taxes to support religious organizations? The answer is simple and important. First, because religious bodies, exemplified by the Vatican, derived their income directly from their members, collected their own funds, and were often quite wealthy.

1Jul2001 | | 1 comment | Continued
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