The Myth of Mental Illness

The claim that "mental illnesses are diagnosable disorders of the brain" is not based on scientific research; it is a lie, an error, or a naive revival of the somatic premise of the long-discredited humoral theory of disease. My claim that mental illnesses are fictitious illnesses is also not based on scientific research; it rests on the materialist-scientific definition of illness as a pathological alteration of cells, tissues, and organs. If we accept this scientific definition of disease, then it follows that mental illness is a metaphor, and that asserting that view is stating an analytic truth, not subject to empirical falsification....  

Moreover, the belief that so-called mental health problems stand in the same relation to brain diseases as, say, urinary problems stand in relation to kidney diseases is superficially attractive, even plausible. The argument goes like this. The human body is a biological machine, composed of parts, called organs, such as the kidneys, the lungs, and the liver. Each organ has a "natural function" and when one of these fails, we have a disease. If we define human problems as the symptoms of brain diseases, and if we have the power to impose our definition on an entire society, then they are brain diseases, even in the absence of any medically ascertainable evidence of brain disease. We can then treat mental diseases as if they were brain diseases.

However, a living human being – a person – is not merely a collection of organs, tissues, and cells. The pancreas may be said to have a natural function. But what is the natural function of the person? That is like asking what is the meaning of life, which is a religious-philosophical, not medical-scientific, question. Individuals professing different religious faiths have kidneys so similar that one may be transplanted into the body of another without altering his personal identity; but their beliefs and habits differ so profoundly that they often find it difficult or impossible to live with one another.

~Thomas  Szasz, update to his book "The Myth of Mental Illness" written over 50 years ago

Thomas Szasz is professor of Psychiatry Emeritus at the State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse, New York.  

The answer to this is found in the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. Man is indeed not merely a blob of tissue (as the evolutionists want to believe), but is made in the image of God, by God, as His crowning creation achievement, to glorify Him and to have a relationship with man that also glorifies Him. Sin is the problem that entered the world through Adam, and that is precisely what is the real problem with all people and why their thinking is wrong and so self-centered--why we are all self-worshippers instead of God-worshippers.

Indeed, because we have a spirit that God breathed into our bodies (as Genesis 1-2 states), we are far more than a collection of mere tissue. Because of that our problems often have to do with things of a spiritual nature---the inner man--that which makes a man a human being, alive and living. Thoughts cannot be medically sick because thoughts are from the heart and mind of man. They are often sinful, and that is the problem. Unless we are saved from our sins and made new in Christ Jesus, we will continue to live enslaved to our sin and wrong thinking, wrong emotions, wrong expectations. Only God and His holy Word can correct those things through His Holy Spirit and Scripture in the believer's life.