What Is The Myth Of Mental Illness By Thomas Szasz

I read the article The Myth of Mental Illness by Thomas S. Szasz. He was arguing that mental illness is a thing and the concept of mental illness is unnecessary and misleading. He takes different points in his article to try to convey that mental illness isn’t a real thing. Thomas thinks that it's crazy that mental illness would be treated in a medical sense because it isn't medical and we shouldn't be able to treat it medically. He also argues that mental illnesses are just as real as witches. Overall he is saying that you can solve your issues on your own and that we just have problems in living and that mental illness is a myth. The language that was used in the article was very different from what we use today. I felt as though I had

but mentions men a lot in that men cannot have mental illness and men can figure out their lives themselves. An example from the article is “For man aware of himself and of the world about him, once the needs for preserving the body (and perhaps the race) are more or less satisfied, the problem arises as to what he should do with himself. Sustained adherence to the myth of mental illness allows people to avoid facing this problem, believing that mental health, conceived as the absence of mental illness, automatically ensures the making of right and safe choices in one's conduct of life.” (Szasz). This is an example of Thomas referring to a man and saying that mental illness avoids people from facing their problems because mental illness isn't

when he was relating mental illness to being as real as witches I was just laughing because I do not agree with that at all. Personally, I think mental illness is a very important thing to be talked about, I don't necessarily think that every single person with a mental illness has to be treated with medication but I do believe that there is some treatment aspect within mental illness. There are so many types of different mental illnesses that I don't understand why someone wouldn't believe in mental illness. because there are so many different mental illnesses they are all treated and diagnosed differently, when reading Thomas's article it felt like mental illness was one thing and it didn't need to be treated because you can figure it out by yourself. I do believe that with self-reflection you can see if you do have a mental illness, and you can seek help for that. but I definitely don't agree with Thomas that mental health isn't a thing and that you can just figure it out by yourself and it will eventually work itself