From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Tue May 14 2002 - 20:10:35 MDT
Amara writes
> >Did you ever read "The Myth of Mental Illness" by Dr. Szasz?
>
> Yes, and I was so disgusted, that I put it in the trash...
> He claims that schizophrenia is not a true disease. The one million+
> afflicted people have a 'fake disease'. For it to be real, he says, 'it
> must be capable of being approached, measured, or tested in a
> scientific fashion'. The evidence that schizophrenia is a brain
> disease is overwhelming, and this illness _is_ regularly approached,
> measured, or tested in a scientific fashion.
> I like Szasz's writings very much, with the exception of _that_ book.
Well, a google search on "Szasz and Schizophrenia" turned up
http://thrivenet.com/schizo/articles/ehss.html,
which claims that S is not a brain disease like Alzheimer's:
Abstract
Prominent psychiatrists are stating that schizophrenia is a brain disease like
Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, or multiple sclerosis. These statements are disconfirmed by
scientific facts: no neurologist can independently confirm the presence or absence of
schizophrenia with laboratory tests because the large majority of people diagnosed with
schizophrenia show no neuropathological or biochemical abnormalities and a few people
without any symptoms of schizophrenia have the same biophysiological abnormalities. People
with schizophrenia do not usually progressively deteriorate: most improve over time.
Psychotherapy and milieu therapy, without medications, have led even the most severely
disturbed individuals with schizophrenia to full recovery and beyond. Many people
diagnosed with schizophrenia have recovered on their own without any treatment, something
never accomplished by a person with Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, or multiple sclerosis.
A number of possibilities occur to me, one of which is that our society
fears drug therapy, which seems to obtain from the "nature is adequate"
movement. But then I don't see why Szasz and the above author are actually
wrong, either, because drugs often help people without brain diseases too.
Lee
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