szasz

• eye of the beholder

  drugs cannot cure them but individuals may be helped by those who respect and understand them

  psychiatrists must protect the patient from themselves and protect society from them

  the behaviours we call illness is a result of medicalisation of behaviours

  those with mental illness are deprived of liberty and responsibility

  mental illness is a myth
• changing perspective


  the old religious and humanistic perspective on the tragic nature of life has been replaced by a modern one

  the secularisation of everyday life and the medicalisation of the soul and personal suffering began in the late 16th century
• medical or logical


  insisted that mental hospitals are like prisons not medical care and psychiatrists are judges not healers

  traditional psychiatric perspective of interpreting mental illness and the psychiatric responses should be rejected

  mental illness is a claim and concept defined by political, economic criteria
• fifty years of change

  1950s

  • not the governments responsibility
  • thought to be incurable
  • confined to mental hospitals

  now

  • governments responsibility
  • mental health workers are now legally responsible for their patients
• individual or patient

  psychiatry identifies them as sick patients who need treatments

  coercing and controlling persons by forced is authorised and mandated by the government which people accept

  bleuler - asked for the recognition of schizophrenics to define and control their own lives but was ignored

  the medicalisation of the longing for non existence led to the creation of the pseudoscience of suicidology
• nature / biological / individual

  CN - faulty neural circuits eg temporal frontal circuit = positive symptoms and sepo-hippocampal = negative symptoms

  C - internal mental processes = firth - schizophrenia - no filtering of irrelevant information
• nurture / environmental / situational

  based on political agenda - eye of the beholder - individuals to determine their level of distress

  behaviourism - schizophrenia is determined by a lack of reinforcement
• reductionist 


  CN - reduces mental illness to its simplest form - abnormal neural activity

  B - mental illness is learned through childhood reinforcement and punishment
• holism


  szasz - must look at the whole person rather than a list of symptoms = all experiences and behaviour
• socially sensitive


  IS NOT - positive impact = explanations impact treatment such as CBT which reduces symptoms

  IS - szasz can cause distress by arguing that mental illness is a myth = patients may be upset if they think they are suffering from something

  IS = szasz - can lead to negative views on psychiatry
• useful


  IS - treatments

  IS - szasz exposed the politicisation of mental illness (ADHD/homosexuality) = encourages personal liberty, choice and limits psychiatry

  IS NOT = szazs - mental illness is not real but provides alternatives - negative wards to psychiatry
• reliability


  fMRI scans - Kupererg on temporal prefrontal neural circuit

  low test retest - 33% overlap in results of two scans taken one hour apart Bennetts 2010 review
• validity


  not an official study just szasz opinion

  not based on empirical evidence

  high validity - evidence supports the explanation of mental illness
• ethnocentric


  culturally specific - szasz politicisation of mental illness = perceptions affected by the dominating political party

  fernando - language referring to mental illness is western