Abstract
In the sixties and seventies there was an intense debate among philosophers, sociologists, psychiatrists, and others about whether or not there is, strictly speaking, such a thing as mental illness. As a model for illness was taken a certain view of somatic illness (or disease1). Adherents of this view, baptized “the medical model”, claimed that a disease is a subnormal functioning of a part, a function, or an organ of the body. Accordingly, there cannot be anything like “mental illness”, but only some physical lesion in the brain. This was, for instance, Thomas Szasz’s view.2 He claimed that all talk of mental illness was metaphorical and, thus, that much of what was called mental illness in fact was no illness at all. Instead he spoke of “problems in living”. These problems were not medical and should therefore not be treated by physicians or psychiatrists.
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Reference
Few people at this time made the today common distinction between disease, as standing for the pathological process, and illness, as the subjective experience of disease (and similar conditions).
Vatz and Weinberg 1983, Szasz 1991.
See Reznek 1991, pp. 40-52.
I take it that what Szasz calls “illness” is what Eysenck calls “disease”.
Laing 1967, Scheff 1966, Foucault 1965, 1986.
For a similar view, see Hacking 1986, 1995.
Svensson 1990.
The closest I have come, so far, are Andreas Heinz 1994 and Mark Pestana 1998. However, I must admit that I have not been able to go through much material written in other languages than the Scandinavian and in English. Note also that I am not claiming that psychologists cannot make philosophical contributions in a discussion like this. However, in general, psychologists (psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, etc.) do not primarily focus on the philosophical or conceptual problems.
Some of them are: Boorse 1976, Hartmann 1960, 1981, Macklin 1972, Brown 1977, Toulmin 1978, Redlich 1952, 1981, and Taylor and Brown 1988. Some of these articles are found in Caplan, Engelhardt and McCartney 1981. Engelhardt and Spicker 1978 also includes papers devoted to this topic.
I am here taking for granted that the self-actualizing person Maslow is discussing is the mentally healthy person.
Maslow’s main criterion was that he admired these people, and the reason for this admiration was mainly success. He admits that this is an unscientific method, but claims support from various other researchers. Now, even if this approach of choosing a class of people is unscientific, his study of them, he claims, is not (Maslow 1993, pp. 40–43 ).
Jourard 1974, Coan 1977.
Jourard 1974, p. 1.
Offer and Sabshin 1966.
Jahoda 1958.
Observe that I will only discuss what constitutes mental health for adults. A developmental theory can of course be added to show how the different mental features are acquired through childhood and youth.
Kurt Danziger gives a striking account of the difference in psychological conceptualization within different cultures (Danziger 1997, pp. 1-5).
I say partly since there are probably some abilities that are necessary but not discussed in this book.
Camap 1971, pp. 3-8.
Ayer 1991, pp. 44-45.
Nordenfelt 1987, p. 11.
The idea is that I need a folk psychological theory in order to state such “laws”.
See “The Goals of Medicine: Setting new priorities” 1996, and Nordenfelt and Tengland 1996.
Redlich 1981, p. 373.
Gelder et al. 1994, p. 827.
The numbers refer to the formal structure (pp. 4-5).
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© 2001 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Tengland, PA. (2001). Introduction. In: Mental Health. International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2237-7_1
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