On the Matter of Psychological Diagnoses

Author’s Note: Mea culpa, good people. In the original iteration of this Substack, I misidentified psychiatrist Thomas Szasz. Long story, so I won’t go into it. In the rewrite, below, I have identified him correctly and added some content.

A friend of mine sent me a Tik Tok video of Hungarian-born, USA-trained psychiatrist Thomas Szasz (1920 – 2012). He’s not identified as such, but I finally (after much digging) figured out who he was because as a graduate student, my thinking was profoundly shaped by Szasz’s two most well-known books, The Myth of Mental Illness and The Manufacture of Madness. In the Tik Tok, Szasz is talking about the farce American psychiatry has become over the past sixty years. He has excellent command of the King’s English, but his accent is thick at times, so I’ll save the reader time and summarize his comments. As you read this essay, keep in mind that Szasz’s critique applies, without so much as a tweak, to psychology and the mental health professions in general.