How would you know how much or how little of “the research” on this topic I have read? The short answer is that you have no idea, because you haven’t begun to engage with the arguments at hand. If you want to demonstrate that there are important facts of which I am not aware you will have to, you know, actually point them out, and not just wave your hands at The Science and The Research without discussing any concrete findings.

Jonathan: For example, because the study of race was used in the past for nefarious purposes, discount any current data on race, even if it means potentially more effective medications for people of certain races.

This is a strawman. Nobody suggested that you should “discount any current data” on so-called “mental illness.” I said that the history of psychiatric abuse is a good reason for caution in appeals to consensus, which is something different. Similarly, people certainly should be cautious of research on racial difference, given the history of racialist pseudoscience. The epistemic authority of a scholarly community depends (in part) on its reliability in getting to the truth, and when there’s a long history of pseudoscience being promoted in order to provide ideological cover for prejudice, there is nothing logically askew in exhibiting a healthy degree of skepticism.

This is hardly ancient history. For example, Homosexuality was a recognized “disorder” until 1974, and so-called “Gender Identity Disorder” remains in the DSM to this day. Walter Freeman was still cutting up people’s brains not 40 years ago.

Of course, if you have an actual argument or empirical data to present, rather than just an appeal to The Science, then that argument and that data can and should be evaluated on its own merits, independently of whatever historical worries one may have. But since you have produced nothing of the sort, there is nothing to be assessed on its own merits; we have only the appeal to authority.

Jonathan: I’m not making an appeal to authority or scientific consensus.

Dismissing an argument on the grounds of an assertion, without further evidence, that its conclusion is “backwards, anti-science, and ignorant” is one of two things. Either it’s (1) an appeal to authority, which can sometimes be a cogent form of argument in the right context, or (2) simple abuse in place of an argument, which never is. I took the more charitable interpretation of supposing that you intended for your remarks to be (1), and so gave an argument as to why the appeal is misplaced, in this context.

If I misunderstood you, and should have adopted the less charitable interpretation, well, I guess I apologize.

Micha,

Two things.

1. You write: “If people who suffer from mental illnesses believe (or are convinced by believing friends and family) that mental illness is a myth, they may not get the help they need, and suffer greatly as a result.”

But Szasz’s views, if implemented, would not deprive the people currently labeled “schizophrenic,” “bipolar,” “depressed,” etc. from “getting help” for their problems. The notion that it would is based on a common but extremely careless misreading of Szasz’s argument. Szasz is quite explicit that the symptoms on which a diagnosis of these pseudo-“diseases” are based are quite real, and pose real problems for people’s lives. What he objects to is the philosophical and political leap of organizing the understanding and “treatment” of those symptoms under pseudomedical terms like “schizophrenia,” “bipolar disorder,” “depression,” etc., which ultimately have a lot more to do with the legal requirement that someone have a diagnosed “disease” in order to get most drugs, than they do with any real scientific basis for the claim that all these symptoms trace to a single, identifiable disease.

In Szasz’s ideal society, people who are suffering from what is now mistakenly called “mental illness” would in fact have far more access to help than they have now, since the abolition of pharmaceutical laws and government licensure laws would remove a couple of the major barriers to entry and price floors on psychiatric “help.”

Szasz also believes that psychiatrists should not have the power to force “help” onto their “patients” against those patients’ wills. But the power to force “help” on unwilling “beneficiaries” is quite a different issue from the ability to “get help” when one needs it.

1. You write: “But shouldn’t one of our goals be truth?”

Sure. But summary dismissal of an argument based on an unsubstantiated assertion that it is “backwards, anti-science, and ignorant” is not, as I see it, a reliable method of getting to the truth. Especially not when there are specific historical reasons to be cautious of “consensus” in the field in question, and when the person whose arguments are being thus dismissed without discussion is in fact a dissenter within the same community of experts whose authority is supposedly being referred to. (In this respect, Szasz’s position, as a professionally trained medical psychiatrist, is quite different from that of creationists who have no training in paleontology and evolutionary biology, or Holocaust deniers who have no training in history. That makes an appeal to authority, rather than an critical engagement with Szasz’s specific arguments, rickety in the extreme.)

Jonathan,

Everyone knows that the only true libertarians are those who support creating new transnational government trade bureaucracies and federal government subsidies for “private” schools. Didn’t you get the latest memo from HQ?