How do we know if it is ethical to coerce adults into ingesting certain (psychiatric) drugs that have potentially deadly side effects? How do we know if someone objectively has a mental illness? We cannot because like heresy and un-Americanism, the definition is subjective. How can we know if we are thinking clearly about psychiatry and psychiatric coercion?
Jokes cannot literally be sick. Minds cannot literally be sick. Mental illness is not literally real.
Mental illness does not literally exist. Mental illness might poetically exist as a metaphorical idea. It is like the idea that a sick joke is not literally sick. The brain can literally be sick, like with stroke, neurosyphilis, cancer, and so forth. The “mind”, like a joke, simply cannot literally be sick unless we use language in inaccurate and imprecise ways. This simply matters because many psychiatrists earn money from psychiatric coercion and justify their actions by claiming mental illness is literally real and effectively turns a person into a non-person (an entity that is not capable of making their own decisions). Similar logic was utilized to justify chattel slavery in America hundreds of years ago (black people are three-fifths of a person, which was in the US Constitution).
Psychiatrist Thomas Szasz wrote about 35 books and wrote extensively about the history of and epistemology within psychiatry.
