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| | the myth of mental illness |
 | | The notion of mental illness thus serves mainly to obscure the everyday fact that life for most people is a continuous struggle, not for biological survival, but for a "place in the sun," "peace of mind," or some other human value. | | | Mental illness, of course, is not literally a "thing" — or physical object — and hence it can "exist" only in the same sort of way in which other theoretical concepts exist. | | | The idea that chronic hostility, vengefulness, or divorce are indicative of mental illness would be illustrations of the use of ethical norms (that is, the desirability of love, kindness, and a stable marriage relationship). |
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http://www.cyc-net.org/cyc-online/cycol-0904-mentalillness.html
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| | Mental illness - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia |
| | Mental illness diagnosis by DSM and ISCDRHP | | | Mental illness is distinct from the legal concepts of sanity and insanity. | | | Mental health, mental hygiene, behavioral health, and mental wellness are all terms used to describe the state or absence of mental illness. |
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_illness
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| | Mental Illness |
| | While there is no sharp divide between the philosophical discussion of the nature of mental illness and the wider philosophical discussion of psychiatry, we can focus on three major issues that have preoccupied the philosophical literature. | | | The philosophical investigation of the nature of mental illness is therefore relevant to many other areas of philosophy. | | | Three mental illnesses that have received attention from philosophers and psychiatric theorists on the issue of responsibility are schizophrenia, psychopathy, and alcoholism. |
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http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-illness
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| | Bob Montgomery argues Australian governments have not been spending enough on mentally ill people. - On Line Opinion - 24/10/2005 |
| | Despite persistent misrepresentations by the media, mentally ill people are no more dangerous than anyone else, except when their illness is active, meaning they have stopped adhering to their treatment plan, often because the necessary support wasnt available. | | | It will require a government of sincere commitment to fund mental illness prevention and mental health promotion programs, because they will necessarily focus on children and the beneficial results will not be seen for some years. | | | Because mental health issues arise in all areas of life, psychologists in all of these other areas can find themselves drawn into clinical work, but it is not their main focus. |
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http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=110
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| | Science, Philosophy and the Myth of Mental Illness |
| | The research evidence is beginning to demonstrate what spiritual leaders have always known, that the internal mental context controls the behavior, and that often these contexts are maladaptive because of the failure of the individual and those around him to habitually codify goodness as a causal factor. | | | Prior to his deductive procedure for uncovering the truth, the traditional means for structuring experience was the myth, a term deriving from the Greek mythos, meaning word in the sense that it is a definitive statement on the subject. | | | Myths need be neither true nor false, just useful constructs for explaining the nature of an experience. |
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http://www.cognitivebehavior.com/theory/science_p.html
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| | The Myth of Mental Illness |
| | If mental illnesses are bodily and empirical, they should be invariant both temporally and spatially, across cultures and societies. | | | Certain mental health afflictions are either correlated with a statistically abnormal biochemical activity in the brain - or are ameliorated with medication. | | | The members of the functional school regard mental health disorders as perturbations in the proper, statistically "normal", behaviours and manifestations of "healthy" individuals, or as dysfunctions. |
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http://www.knowledge-finder.com/psychology/myth-mental-illness.html
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| | Does Mental Illness Exist? |
| | If mental illness were really an illness in the same sense that physical illnesses are illnesses, the idea of deleting homosexuality or anything else from the categories of illness by having a vote would be as absurd as a group of physicians voting to delete cancer or measles from the concept of disease. | | | When confronted with the lack of evidence for their belief in mental illness as a biological entity, some defenders of the concept of mental illness will assert that mental illness can exist and can be defined as a "disease" without there being a biological abnormality causing it. | | | So they do stop disliked behavior and may mentally disable a person enough he can no longer feel angry or unhappy or "depressed". |
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http://www.antipsychiatry.org/exist.htm
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| | Ephilosopher :: General Philosophy Forum :: The myth of mental illness |
| | As a demonstration of the fact that mental illness is a term that is designed to deceive one into thinking that it is a function of the individual, consider how it is that we view the drugs used to 'treat' these 'conditions' as having 'side-effects' that are also attributable to the individual. | | | The idea, contrastingly, that mental illness is not a matter of undesirable symptomology, per se; but, rather, of societal intolerance of such symptomology is a bit narrow. | | | Yes, it is true that mental illness can be defined according to social and cultural norms- however, this is not the only reason why mental disorders are so called. |
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http://www.ephilosopher.com/phpBB_14-action-viewtopic-topic-1750.html
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| | Geometry.Net - Health Conditions Books: Schizophrenia |
| | While this field emerged out of research of treating schizophrenia with niacin in 1960's, today orthomolecular medicine offers very effective and safe treatments for large range of mental health conditions. | | | Finally an alternative medicine book that is good | | | As patients and families begin their journeys with the medical profession, it is good to have a copy of SURVIVING SCHIZOPHRENIA in their pockets. |
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http://www.988.com/health_conditions_bk/schizophrenia.html
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| | A Vision for New Directions in Mental Health Reform |
| | I see psychiatrists living lacklustre, stressed, depressed, angst-ridden, even suicidal lives of 'quiet desperation' that pass for health and normalcy, psychiatrists who believe that 'mental illness' is a 'chemical imbalance', or 'brain disease', even though there is no medical proof of such claims. | | | What vanishes with the inevitable deletion of the 'mental illness' phantom from our language, is precisely the authoritarian medical model on which the 'mental illness' industry thrives. | | | I recently read in a Mental Health Newsletter an account of a schizophrenia sufferer, whose relatives viewed as 'odd behaviour' his giving away of personal possessions and request that friends right wrongs done to one another. |
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http://www.jungcircle.com/vision.html
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| | Mental Health and Civil Liberties |
| | Szasz has attempted to replace the illness model of mental disturbances with an analysis in terms of meaningful (but perhaps unconscious) communication. | | | The reason that Sedgwick is so anxious for mental disabilities to be called illnesses is political: Without the concept of mental illness, he argues we shall be unable to make demands on the health service facilities of the society we live in (Sedgwick 1982 p.40). | | | The mental illness called depression is a dramatisation of the proposition I am unhappy. |
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http://www.mdx.ac.uk/www/study/mhhlib.htm
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| | mental illness |
| | Prozac Backlash by Joseph Glenmullen, M.D. The Anti-depressant Fact Book by Peter R. Breggin, M.D. Toxic Psychiatry by Peter R. Breggin, M.D. Orthomolecular Treatment for Schizophrenia by A. Hoffer, M.D., Ph.D. Nutrition and Mental Illness by Carl C. Pfeiffer, Ph.D., M.D. Let Them Eat Prozac by David Healy, MD FRCPsych | | | There are many physical illnesses, including imbalances of nutrients in the system, that cause behavior that is often diagnosed as mental illness. | | | I was not entirely convinced that the reasons given in these books for the way nutitional therapy works are based on incontrovertible evidence. |
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http://www.judithlautner.net/mental.html
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| | Mental Health Myths |
| | Myth #8: If you have a mental illness, you can will it away. | | | Misconceptions about mental illness are pervasive, and the lack of understanding can have serious consequences for millions of people who have a psychiatric illness, according to the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD). | | | Myth #2: People with a severe mental illness, such as schizophrenia, are usually dangerous and violent. |
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http://www.mhagstl.org/myths.htm
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| | An Alternative Psychobiological View on Mental Illness |
| | Although it is widely accepted by now that the Kraepelinian view on psychiatric illness is getting outdated, the consideration of a mental disease as a well-defined entity appears to be quite deeply embedded in human thinking. | | | These comprise the physiological (dealing with neurons, ions, potentials, etc.), the mentalistic (dealing with mental phenomena like emotion and motivation), the conceptual (considering the CNS as a black box that can be modeled based on its input/output relations) and the behavioristic (only accepting behavioral parameters as useful for scientific practice). | | | This view illustrates not only the variation in behavior and mental processes but also the possible variation in the way we look at it (and in fact these two aspects are essentially the same). |
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http://www.xs4all.nl/~helfrich/psycho/psycho1.html
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| | a2.htm |
| | [The community mental health care nurse] must be sensitive to changes in behavior that signal that the patient is decompensating psychiatrically... | | | The contemporary psychiatric system operates predominantly through free choices made in the personal domain, in which mental health is both a private objective and a personal responsibility; the promotion of the self is conducted through the voluntary enlistment of help from skilled technicians. | | | Mental Hygiene societies were subsequently also founded in several other countries, such as the Social Hygiene Council in England (Porter, 1987b); the National League for Mental Hygiene in 1924 in Italy (Mora, 1975) and the Hungarian League for the Protection of the Mentally Ill in the same year (Horánszky, 1975). |
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http://www.criticalmethods.org/a2.htm
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| | Critics' Corner: Cathy Young on Thomas Szasz and the myth of mental illness |
| | The assertion that mental illness is a "myth" seems to me so out of touch with reality (at least to anyone who has ever known a mentally ill person, as I have) as to merit no discussion. | | | Serious mental illness, according to experts and pundits, is rampant among America's children and adolescents, striking as many as one in five before they reach adulthood. | | | The trouble is, this approach essentially reduces the human condition to a clinical condition, leaving no room for such stodgy notions as character or human spirit - or for deviations from a rather rigid norm of mental health. |
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http://www.szasz.com/cyoung.html
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| | State v. Breakiron, 108 N.J. 591 (1987) |
| | According to that Statement, the mental disease or defect "must be of such a nature as to preclude the actor from knowing the nature and quality of the act or that what he was doing was wrong." The State, however, does not argue that the Legislature has in fact abolished this defense. | | | Superimposed upon this structure of culpable mental state was the problem of dealing with the criminally insane. | | | 618] at 905 (evidence of mental defect focused on defendant's unconscious mind, not his conscious mind; hence proper to instruct jury not to consider the evidence on mens rea element of the offense). |
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http://wings.buffalo.edu/law/bclc/web/njbreakiron.html
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| | Foucault_michel_madness_and_civilization.txt |
| | Mental illness and unreason attracted that stigma to themselves, but even this was neither complete, simple, nor immediate. | | | A hundred and sixteen cantos of Brant's poem are devoted to portraits of the insane passengers on the Ship: there are misers, slanderers, drunkards; there are those who indulge in disorder and debauchery; those who interpret the Scriptures falsely; those who practice adultery. | | | The roots and symptoms of folly are being looked for today in psychology, medicine, and sociology, but they were and still are as present and important in art,* religion, ethics, and epistemology. |
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http://www.e-text.org/text/Foucault_michel_madness_and_civilization.txt
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| | Museum's Newsletter -Millie Niss |
| | Mentally ill artists should not be expected to make art only out of mental illness material; they should be allowed the same choice of themes as any artist. | | | The art works created by people with mental health problems may also give other people a clearer picture of what life is like for someone who is, or has been, affected by mental illness, tackling and reducing the stigma often associated with mental health, breaking down barriers to understanding of mental health problems. | | | I think that mental patients are as capable of making art as anyone else, but the work made during Art Therapy or Occupational Therapy rarely is Art, because these activities are designed by non-artists who often make it impossible for the clients to make anything creative or original. |
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http://arteonline.arq.br/newsletter/reviews2005/english_niss.htm
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| | Psychiatry |
| | Psychiatry is a branch of medicine that studies and treats mental and emotional disorders (see mental illness). | | | Links moved from medicine, to be sorted and explained: Bipolar disorder -- Depression -- Mental Retardation -- Schizophrenia -- Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder -- More | | | Psychiatrists are medical doctors and may prescribe drugs, while psychologists have extensive training in therapy and psychological testing, and do not prescribe drugs. |
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http://www.sciencedaily.com/encyclopedia/psychiatry
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| | Amazon.com: Books: The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (Revised Edition) |
| | Szasz's makes some valid points about the problems with the diagnoses of mental illness and about the psychiatric profession in general, but his views on the underlying nature of mental illness (a "mythological explanation of human wickedness") are just false. | | | Since the modern concept of hysteria was cut from the cloth of malingering, and since the physician most responsible for establishing "hysteria" as a medically legitimate illness was Charcot, I shall start with an examination of his work; and I shall then trace the development of the concept of hysteria to the present time. | | | The mental health field has of course changed considerably since the 70's and a lot of those people are now out on the streets talking to themselves. |
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http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060911514?v=glance
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| | The Slovak Spectator - Slovakia's English Language Newspaper |
| | Mental problems are the third most frequent reason behind physical disability, and five diseases of the mind are among the 10 illnesses that most burden society. | | | According to data included in the Health Ministry's National Programme of Mental Health, in 1992 there were 58,119 new cases of mental illness registered, while in 2000 the number of new cases rose to 66,346; and in 2002, as many as 76,915 new cases were registered. | | | Reforms and changes, no matter how successful and praiseworthy they may be, will always hurt a number of citizens who find it difficult to cope with the psychological burden of drastic change. |
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http://www.slovakspectator.sk/clanok-17500.html
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| | The myth of mental illness- Mental Health |
| | The term "Mental Illness," unfortunately does bring alot of stigma with it, but I think it is an accurate term when a person is suffering from disorders of the mind and/or emotions. | | | Carl Jung did not believe in mental illness, but felt that it was a natural part of our psyches and did not see it as something terrible. | | | The mental health profession has changed my life. |
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http://www.soberrecovery.com/forums/showthread.php?t=26308
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| | Amazon.co.uk: Books: Living Outside Mental Illness: Qualitative Studies of Recovery in Schizophrenia |
| | Subjects > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Psychology & Psychiatry > Specific Topics > Mental Health & Illness | | | Amazon.co.uk: Books: Living Outside Mental Illness: Qualitative Studies of Recovery in Schizophrenia | | | It presents an in-depth investigation, based on a phenomenological perspective, of experiences of illness and recovery as illuminated by compelling first-person descriptions. |
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http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0814719430
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| | Late Medieval |
| | ‘mental illness and mental retardation (which were lumped together) were attributed to supernatural causes and considered in the province of priests and philosophers. | | | As for the degree of mental illness required, Bracton explains … that the terms he uses (‘furiosus vel non sanae mentis’) mean a total lack of ‘discretion’ and ‘understanding’, an animal-like state. | | | The notion of confining the mentally afflicted in dark dungeons, keeping them in chains and in a state of fear, was prevalent in almost every institution or facility for such individuals at the time. |
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http://www.diligio.com/late_medieval.htm
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| | Sample text for Library of Congress control number 99042208 |
| | For women whose mental illnesses defied medical doctrine, doctors increasingly prescribed massive surges of electrical currents delivered to the brain,-Iarge doses of insulin to induce convulsions, or, for seemingly hopeless cases, a surgical operation to sever nerve pathways in the frontal lobes of the cerebrum. | | | There were tales from the Middle Ages, detailing how those suffering from mental illness were considered lepers and sent away to remote countrysides or warehoused on a "Ship of Fools." Other stories spoke of public whippings and barred windows that allowed passers-by to observe mad men and women shackled by chains. | | | By the time I closed in on the I latter part of the twentieth century, it was clear that mental illness had become inextricably tied to a vast array of prescription drugs. |
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http://www.loc.gov/catdir/samples/random044/99042208.html
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| | MENTAL ILLNESS: FACT AND FICTION |
| | Contrary to what is commonly believed, most people with a mental illness recover well with appropriate ongoing treatment and support. | | | Shouldn’t people with a mental illness be kept in hospital? | | | There is no cure yet, but it is a treatable illness. |
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http://www.mydr.com.au/?article=2319
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| | Phase III - Bush to screen population for mental illness |
| | Ah, but wait until you discover that the definitions of mental illness include people who have fixed religious beliefs. | | | Re: Bush to screen population for mental illness | | | The panel found that "despite their prevalence, mental disorders often go undiagnosed" and recommended comprehensive mental health screening for "consumers of all ages," including preschool children. |
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http://news.phaseiii.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3040
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| | The Myth of Mental Illness by Thomas Szasz - Scientism, Scientific Mythology |
| | The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct | | | Szasz shows the concept of "mental illness" to be as flimsy as were the past similar stigmatizing concepts of "witchcraft" and "heresy". | | | Within a year of the first publication of this book the Commissioner of the NY State Dept. of Mental Health demanded Szasz be dismissed from his university position for failing to "believe" in mental illness. |
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http://www.ftrbooks.net/psych/szasz/myth_mental_illness.htm
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| | War of two religious worldviews - Commentary - The Washington Times, America's Newspaper |
| | Cruise believes problems in living are not caused by "mental illnesses" cured by psychiatric drugs, Miss Shields believes the opposite. | | | For in fact psychiatrists have yet to conclusively prove any mental illness is caused by a chemical imbalance of any kind. | | | Joining with psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, author of "The Myth of Mental Illness," Scientology founded the Citizens Commission on Human Rights to help Americans who feel their civil rights have been violated by the mental health movement. |
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http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20050706-094908-8654r.htm
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