"The Myth of Mental Illness."

True fact - when Denny O'Neil wrote The Question in 1987, he changed the main character's "real" name from Vic Sage to Charles Victor Szasz [disregard the fact that the character was an orphan, and that wasn't his real name either] - so it's clearly not coincidental that besides being an ass-kicking kung-fu adventure tale, it also became a meditation on identity, sanity and violence. One of my favorite comics ever, certainly in ambition, if not necessarily execution. [Execution wise, probably 3rd or 4th favorite, but still way, way up there.] All roads lead to comics. Always.

Thomas Szasz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

"Szasz consistently pays attention to the power of language in the establishment and maintenance of the social order, both in small interpersonal as well as wider socio-political spheres:

"The struggle for definition is veritably the struggle for life itself. In the typical Western two men fight desperately for the possession of a gun that has been thrown to the ground: whoever reaches the weapon first shoots and lives; his adversary is shot and dies. In ordinary life, the struggle is not for guns but for words; whoever first defines the situation is the victor; his adversary, the victim. For example, in the family, husband and wife, mother and child do not get along; who defines whom as troublesome or mentally sick?...[the one] who first seizes the word imposes reality on the other; [the one] who defines thus dominates and lives; and [the one] who is defined is subjugated and may be killed."^[7]

His main arguments can be summarised as follows:

• The myth of mental illness: "Mental illness" is an expression, a metaphor that describes an offending, disturbing, shocking, or vexing conduct, action, or pattern of behavior, such as schizophrenia, as an "illness" or "disease". Szasz wrote: "If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic."^[7] While people behave and think in ways that are very disturbing, and that may resemble a disease process (pain, deterioration, response to various interventions), this does not mean they actually have a disease. To Szasz, disease can only mean something people "have," while behavior is what people "do". Psychiatry actively obscures the difference between (mis)behavior and disease, in its quest to help or harm parties to conflicts. By calling certain people "diseased", psychiatry attempts to deny them responsibility as moral agents, in order to better control them.

People who are said (by themselves or others) to "have" a mental illness can only have, at best, a "fake disease." Diagnoses of "mental illness" or "mental disorder" (the latter expression called by Szasz a "weasel term" for mental illness) are passed off as "scientific categories" but they remain merely judgments (judgments of disdain) to support certain uses of power by psychiatric authorities.

...In Ceremonial Chemistry (1973), he argued that the same persecution which has targeted witches, Jews, Gypsies or homosexuals now targets "drug addicts" and "insane" people. Szasz argued that all these categories of people were taken as scapegoats of the community in ritual ceremonies. To underscore this continuation of religion through medicine, he even takes as example obesity: instead of concentrating on junk food (ill-nutrition), physicians denounced hypernutrition. According to Szasz, despite their scientific appearance, the diets imposed were a moral substitute to the former fasts, and the social injunction not to be overweight is to be considered as a moral order, not as a scientific advice as it claims to be. As with those thought bad (insane people), those who took the wrong drugs (drug-addicts), medicine created a category for those who had the wrong weight (obeses).

Szasz argued that psychiatrics were created in the 17th century to study and control those who erred from the medical norms of social behavior...

...Szasz's critics maintain that, contrary to his views, such illnesses are now regularly "approached, measured, or tested in scientific fashion."^[15] The list of groups that reject his opinion that mental illness is a myth include the American Medical Association (AMA) , American Psychiatric Association (APA) and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

The effectiveness of medication has been used as an argument against Szasz’s idea that depression is a myth. In a debate with Szasz, Donald F. Klein, M.D explained:

“It is that elementary fact, that the antidepressants do little to normals, and are tremendously effective in the clinically depressed person, that shows us that this is an illness” ^[16]

But as the New England Journal of Medicine reported on January 17, 2008, in published trials, about 60 percent of people taking the drugs report significant relief from depression, compared with roughly 40 percent of those on placebo pills. But when the less positive, unpublished trials are included, the advantage shrinks: the drugs outperform placebos, but perhaps only by a modest margin.^[17]. "