10-15-2024, 01:41 PM
In this book "The Myth Of Mental Illness", Dr. Thomas Szasz posited that there was no such thing as "mental illness", citing the fact that all things so labeled are actually diseases of the brain, which result in cognitive symptoms. While his arguments are compelling, I believe that he missed what may be a single exception to his thesis, constituting a special case.
The case to which I refer may be broadly labeled as a brand of psychosis. Certainly there are those sorts of psychoses that are caused by problems with the brain, schizophrenia being a prime example. But there is another brand that roots not in brain malfunction, but in that which an individual comes to believe in cases where no brain infirmity can be identified. One can cite religious indoctrination, as well as that which children are taught in schools, by family, by the various media, the culture at large, and so forth.
Psychosis is defined as a disconnection from reality. Psychoses are made manifest in any of a number of ways, including those that have nothing to do with brain dysfunction, but the other ways in which people come to perceive and believe things that do not prove out as being sound and true.
An example of this might include the Heaven's Gate cult where people who were presumably intact in organic terms, were convinced to take their own lives for the sake of joining a "mother ship" awaiting them in orbit around the earth. If that does not qualify as psychosis, then I cannot imagine what might.
The point I am attempting to convey here is that it appears to me that the adoption as true those things which may be demonstrated as false may qualify as actual mental illness. What else might we call such a condition or circumstance?
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