No further evidence is needed to show that "mental illness" is not the name of a biological condition whose nature awaits to be el...ucidated, but is the name of a concept whose purpose is to obscure the obvious.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An ideologue may be defined as a mad intellectual. He is not interested in ideas, but--almost the exact contrary--in one idea. Whe...n he erects this idea into a system and forces the system to give birth to a way of life, confusion often results, usually to his great surprise. Two examples are Robespierre and Lenin. The intellectual is occasionally blamed for the work of the ideologue, which is like condemning the psychiatrist because he and the patient are both involved in the same thing, mental illness. The ideologue is often brilliant. Consequently some of us distrust brilliance when we should distrust the ideologue.... The ideologue is often more persuasive than the intellectual because he has a simpler line of goods to sell and never questions its value. Sometimes he achieves great success by attacking the real intellectual--Bryan is a good example.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The entire construct of the "medical model" of "mental illness"Mwhat is it but an analogy? Between physical medicine and psychiatr...y: the mind is said to be subject to disease in the same manner as the body. But whereas in physical medicine there are verifiable physiological proofs--in damaged or affected tissue, bacteria, inflammation, cellular irregularity--in mental illness alleged socially unacceptable behavior is taken as a symptom, even as proof, of pathology.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Man is not merely the sum of his masks. Behind the shifting face of personality is a hard nugget of self, a genetic gift.... The s...elf is malleable but elastic, snapping back to its original shape like a rubber band. Mental illness is no myth, as some have claimed. It is a disturbance in our sense of possession of a stable inner self that survives its personae.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a com...mon sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How strange to have failed as a social creature--even criminals do not fail that way--they are the law's "Loyal Opposition," so to... speak. But the insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about persons and things; the psychotic ...has convictions and makes claims about them. In short, the neurotic has problems, the psychotic has solutions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As much as possible, and this as quickly as possible: that is what the great mental and emotional illness craves that is variously... called "present" or "culture," but that is actually a symptom of consumption.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Even if someone knew the entire physical history of the world, and every mental event were identical with a physical, it would not... follow that he could predict or explain a single mental event (so described, of course).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »