We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
My three main points are:
(a) Mental disease is a metaphor, but mental illness is not.
(b) Feeling ill and having a physical illness are logically related. If there were no such thing as feeling ill, there would be no such thing as suffering from a physical illness. Yet there is no logical connection between feeling ill and being mentally ill.
(c) Mental illness is manifested in various forms of behaviour, for example, suspiciousness, elation, depression, etc.; if a form of behaviour is to count as mental illness, it has to be an insane form; yet it is possible to be mentally ill without being insane and it is possible to be insane without being mentally ill.
1 Szasz, Thomas S., The Myth of Mental Illness (New York: Hoeber-Harper, 1961).Google Scholar
2 Flew, Antony, Crime or Disease? (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1973).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 Kenny, Anthony, ‘Mental Health in Plato's Republic’, Proc. British Academy (1969), 229–253.Google Scholar
4 Margolis, Joseph, Negativities: The Limits of Life (Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill, 1975), chs 7, 8, ‘Illness’ and ‘Insanity’, 95–117.Google Scholar
5 Feinberg, Joel, Doing and Deserving (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1970)Google Scholar, ch. II, ‘What is So Special about Mental Illness?’, 272–292.
6 Fingarette, Herbert, The Meaning of Criminal Insanity (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1972).Google Scholar
7 Moore, Michael S., ‘Some Myths about “Mental Illness”’, Inquiry 18 (1975), 233–265.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8 Boorse, Christopher, ‘On the Distinction between Disease and Illness’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 5 (1975), 49–68.Google Scholar
9 Ausubel, David P., ‘Personality Disorder is Disease’, in Mental Illness and Social Processes, Scheff, T. J. (ed.) (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 254–266.Google Scholar
10 Macklin, Ruth, ‘Mental Health and Mental Illness: Some Problems of Definition and Concept Formation’, Philosophy of Science 39 (1972), 341–365.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
11 Brown, Robert, ‘Physical Illness and Mental Health’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 7 (1977), 17–38.Google Scholar
12–15 Szasz, Thomas S.: The Manufacture of Madness (New York: Harper & Row, 1970)Google Scholar; The Theology of Medicine (Oxford, Melbourne: OUP, 1979); Schizophrenia (Oxford, New York, etc.: OUP, 1979); The Myth of Psychotherapy (Oxford, Melbourne: OUP, 1979).
16 Hunter, Richard, ‘Psychiatry and Neurology: Psychosyndrome or Brain Disease?’, Proc. Royal Society of Medicine 66 (1973), 17–22.Google ScholarPubMed
17 Foucault, Michel, Madness and Civilisation (London: Tavistock Publications, 1967)Google Scholar, translated by Howard, Richard: first published as Histoire de la Folie in 1961 by Librairie Plon.Google Scholar
18 Hunter, Richard and Macalpine, Ida (eds), Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535–1860 (London: OUP, 1963).Google Scholar
19 This information was gleaned from several encyclopaedias, one of which said reassuringly that tin disease was known to Aristotle.
20 See Szasz's summary of his argument, pp. 275–276, The Myth of Mental Illness (Paladin revised edition, 1972).
21 Aphorisms, II, 6, in The Medical Works of Hippocrates, translated by Chadwick, John and Mann, W. N. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1950), 151.Google Scholar
22 Quotation from Georges Guillain's biography of Charcot, J.-M. Charcot, edited and translated by Bailey, Pearce (London: Pitman, 1959), 140.Google Scholar
23 Freud, Singmund, ‘The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated by Strachey, James et al. , vol. XIX (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 183–187.Google Scholar
24 Wittgenstein, , Vermischte Bemerkungen (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), 104Google Scholar, 105. The English translations are my own.
