IF THEY'RE NOT ILLNESSES WHAT ARE THEY?

On January 17, 2013, Peter Kinderman, PhD, Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Liverpool, wrote an article titled Grief and Anxiety are not mental illnesses. On February 4, 2013, Steven Novella, MD, wrote a critique of Dr. Kinderman’s article. On February 20, I wrote a critique of Dr. Novella’s article. And finally, on September 17, Dr. Novella wrote More On Mental Illness Denial and How Not to Argue, a critique of my critique. ...

BACKGROUND I recently received the following question from Disparity, on Twitter. "I'm interested in all your posts, but they're always telling us what mental illness 'isn't.' Do you have many on what it 'is'? I referred him/her to the post There are No Mental Illnesses and received the following reply: "I have read it a few times. I largely agree with it. But 'something' happens to people. Whatever the label." Questions of this sort arise fairly frequently, and I thought it might be helpful to write a post. WHAT HAPPENS TO PEOPLE? ...

BACKGROUND Sam Thompson (University of Liverpool) posted the following tweet on April 27: Can anyone point me to a good, succinct summary of the case for equating mental distress with illness? (serious, non-sarcastic question) On the face of it, this looks like a straightforward question, and one might think that a straightforward answer could be found. But this is not the case, because ultimately it boils down to a matter of definition. And psychiatry is a field where definitions are notoriously fuzzy. MENTAL DISORDER ...

I have been writing this blog for the past three years. The primary concepts are scattered throughout the blog, and I thought it might be helpful to draw together the essential underlying concepts in one post. Some of this repeats material covered under the individual “diagnoses,” and for this I apologize to my regular readers, but the notion that there are no mental illnesses (which I repeat regularly) is unorthodox and warrants clarification. ...

The human brain is a pattern-seeking machine. Because of his brain, man strives to understand the world around him and uses this understanding to improve his lot. The brain looks for patterns and explanations. Our ancestors, for instance, discovered that certain rocks, through processing in certain ways, could be shaped to make sharp tools which they used to great advantage. Later it was discovered that other rocks when heated in certain ways produced iron. And so on. ...

The central theme of this blog is that mental illness is a spurious and invalid concept, which is promoted and developed by the American Psychiatric Association to legitimize the use of mood-altering drugs. It is certainly true that people display various problems in their daily lives and particularly in their interpersonal relationships. The American Psychiatric Association claims that all such problems are caused by mental illness and their list of these so-called illnesses is so long that virtually anybody can be embraced within their coils. ...