Re: Anti-Psychiatry

Below is an excellent review of the book you are promoting was published in 1984.  In fact at Amazon about 50% of the reviewers had similar opinions.  You might also be interested in the fact that Szasz also changed his mind about this topic during his career.

The real cause of mental illness is trans-mediumship.  You and everyone else has the ability to allow other beings, both in and out of body to enter and use/control your reality.  It is what's behind multiple personality disorder and many other afflictions.  An excellent examples is when you do or say something and you immediately tell yourself "why did I just do that?"  It's because you as spirit weren't grounded and you as spirit were somewhere else while another being was taking control of your reality.  Charles Manson, Thomas Edison, George W. Bush are but a few good examples of trans-mediums.  You can channel "good" entities and "bad" entities - it makes no difference.

Learn grounding and you the eternal spirit can come in and control your reality the way you desire and not the way that others desire for you.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Mental-Illness-Foundations/product-reviews/006...

I wish I could believe that this book was a hilarious parody, a deliberate reductio ad absurdum of the worst anti-psychiatric cliches of the '60s. Unfortunately, Szasz has built a career on denying that mental illness exists, so I must assume that he actually believes this. He expounds a largely fictitious "history" of psychiatry (he seriously seems to believe that Freud and the psycho-analysts invented mental illness, ignoring the fact that all known cultures, back to the Ancient Greeks, have had a concept of mental illness) in order to claim that mental illness is just a myth invented by wicked psychiatrists.

The more astute may wonder what Szasz makes of those inconvenient people who report hallucinations, delusions, agonizing depression, etc., etc. Being a deeply compassionate and humanitarian person, Szasz simply accuses them of malingering (yes, he actually says this). He appears to think that people with schizophrenia, depression, bi-polar disorder, and so forth should just "pull themselves together". I found myself wondering if Szasz had ever actually met, let alone listened to, anyone with a mental illness.

Yes, psychiatry, like other forms of medicine, often needs criticism, and has a history of abuse of power behind it. But no-one believes that the solution to abuse of power in other forms of medicine is to declare that bodily illnesses are a "myth" invented by doctors, and that those who complain of broken legs are malingerers. I can only assume that Szasz's fame is due to a stunning amount of popular ignorance and misinformation about mental illness. Having experienced a mental illness (clinical depression) myself, I have to say that Szasz's book adds insult to injury.

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