That's all i recall too. Never read him, but worked with someone in grad school who did like his work a lot, so always heard about the guy second-hand. This is what I wrote about the book I'd read last year, which applies to what you're saying is your understanding of Szaz. In this case, because schizophrenics were once treated as people capable of integrating into society (and ex-father-in-law was schizophrenic and lived this way) that's how they were viewed. But these days, schizophrenics (and a growing number of other folks with various disorders) accept the disease model and, increasingly, see themselves as diseased and disabled.
Speaking of disabled... I live in a huge military town and, increasingly, I'm hearing that when people get out of the military and try to collect GI Bill benefits they are being encouraged by VA counselers to find a way to declare themselves as suffering from PTSD. I'm trying to figure out if this is a meme (like spitting on GIs) that is about one faction of survivors wishing to denigrate another faction (mentally disabled vets suffering from PTSD) because it feels better to believe that those who've declared mentally disability are faking it - helps them assuage their survivor's guilt maybe?. Or if it is really going on where they are trying to control the costs by pushing off legitimate claims into disability claims....?
At any rate, here's the excerpt from Anatomy of an Epidemic:
[lbo-talk] Americans: doped up for decades
shag carpet bomb Sat Aug 27 08:25:11 PDT 2011
---------- I think other people have made suggestions that this might be the case, but I found some numbers to back up the speculation: by 1967, 1/3 of US adults were being treated with psychoactive meds. Looks like there isn't an epidemic that started recently, but one that's been going on for decades. Before the rise of the medical professions, people were doped up on meds they bought from peddlers, quacks, mid-wives, and fuller brush salesmen (vitaveetavegamin....) After the rise of the medical professions, people just got the meds from licensed physicians and pharmacists. For awhile now, about 1/3 of Americans need to be in a mind-altered state to get through the day....
In his book, Anatomy of an Epidemic (hurricane reading....), Robert Whitaker (the author mentioned in the NYRB article on the epidemic of mental illness Joanna linked to) documents the rise of the notion that mental disorders such as anxiety, depression, mania, schizophrenia, etc. are "chemical imbalances in the brain" - an idea that has been thoroughly debunked. He also shows us how Big Pharma co-opted the AMA which had once been a sort of watch dog for the pharmaceutical industry but then became big pharma's lap dog in the 1940s and 50s. This is a great history in so far as most people think this relationship was only sinister very recently. Not so, says Whitaker.
Thorazine and miltown launched the "psychopharmacology revolution", creating drugs that said to be "like insulin for diabetics" and "potent regulator(s) of unbalanced cerebral metabolism" from one of several fascinating Time articles of the era. With the co-optation of doctors by big pharma, by 1967, Whitaker writes, "one in three American adults filled a prescription for a "psychoactive" medication, with total sales of such drugs reaching $692 million."
I'm looking forward to further development of his thesis in which he points out something that runs contrary to a claim Carrol has made. He spends time doing ethnographic work with members of a bipolar support group, doing case studies on them. Half of these folks feel they were helped by the drugs, the other half feel they were not and have gotten off them. The people on drugs are all on disability, unable to work. The people who got off the drugs are living ordinary lives and aren't on disability. (I think this is an important thing people have overlooked: getting a mental disability diagnosis is a way to supplement family income.... I learned about this from a guy at work and wonder how much of this is being fueled by that...)
Anyway, Carrol says that, while incorrect, the chemical imbalance theory of mental health has the virtue of destigmatizing mental illness. But this isn't a uniform opinion among those who have been diagnosed with mental illnesses/spectrum disorders. A strand of people he talks with, including supporters and members of the Depressive and Manic Depressives Association, argue that the chemical imbalance approach is also stigmatizing. The chemical imbalance theory just changes the nature of the stigma. In this case, they label themselves as disabled in one or several ways: unable to get along with co-workers, unable to work, incapable of normal relationships, etc. In other words, they are stigmatized as people who cannot live normal lives and/or as people who can't help misbehaving with co-workers, neighbors, friends, family, etc. I'm born this way or the drugs make me this way; I can't help it. For others, it's a self image and belief that they are incapable of being productive members of their household and/or unable to hold down a job. *
The people he interviewed say that they now have to fight this stigma - their own debilitating self understandings according to some. In other words, in the words of David Rudy - they learn how to *become* mentally ill -- which means that, regardless as to the origin of their condition (biological, genetic, whatever), mental illness is socially constituted and people come to see themselves certain ways once they are labeled mentally ill. In this case, critiqes of the medical model are saying that there are drawbacks to this approach as well. Though foucault isn't mentioned, the point is: there's no progress here.
To those who see the medical/chemistry model of mental illness as a problem, the answer was to get off the drugs and stop seeing themselves as people who needed to be treated with drugs to handle their problems. Instead, the learned to cope in other ways, including a guy diagnosed as schizophrenic who is no longer on meds for it.
The one thing that is annoying me so far, though, is that Whitaker seems to be using the "productive member of society" trope to subtly persuade. In other words, he's saying that rise in the number of people collecting SSI/SSDI payments is alarming because there are so many unproductive members of society who aren't holding down jobs. I mean, I happen to think that people need to be productive members of society - something they do that contributes to the betterment of their and others' lives. But he's using it in a way to sort of say, at least so far, "See, there are all these people sitting around on the dole when they could be holding down regular jobs." One woman, from an elite background, even calls her monthly check from SSDI being "on welfare."
>but thinking about any disability, one sees that what phenomenon one
>explains is necessarily the interaction of what we bring to to the table,
>be it brain chemistry and the range of associated behavior along with the
>way we have structured our social lives and how that interacts with the
>behavioral traits that may be caused or explained by (more pointless
>nuance) brain chemistry or what have you. If people who behave roughly as
>schizophrenics do are treated as visionaries or prophets, and there is a
>place in society for people who imagine valleys of dried bones and the
>like, then schizophrenia, as we regard it, might be one way that some
>people can occupy an important social role rather than a debilitating
>illness. They won't be happy, but the prophetic role is rarely the
>provenance of happy people.
>
>Sent from my iPad
>
>On Sep 13, 2012, at 5:10 PM, shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com> wrote:
>
> > well, the general medical opinion now is that they have all pretty much
> recanted the argument that mental disorders in general can be described
> as problems with 'brain chemistry'. that's not to say that the issue
> isn't physical, just that the brain chemistry argument has fallen into
> disrepute because investigations have revealed that bad research was
> peddled by drug companies with a stake in a brain chemistry explanation.
> I reviewed a bunch of those books and reported on them here back in
> july-sept of 2008. [1]
> >
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)