Is Madness a Disease?
"No behaviour - or mis-behaviour - can ever be a disease" - Professor Thomas Szasz, Diagnosis by Design, 2002
Psychiatric "Disorders" are not medical diseases.
In medicine, strict criteria exist for calling a condition a disease: a predictable group of symptoms and the cause of the symptoms or an understanding of the physiology (function) must be proven and established.
Chills and fever are symptoms. Malaria and typhoid are diseases. Diseases are proven to exist by objective evidence and physical tests.
Yet no mental "diseases" have ever been proven to medically exist.
The Basis of Psychiatric Diagnosis
There are 374 'diseases' listed in the DSM - the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. This is the 'central reference text' at the core of mainstream psychiatry worldwide. Its European companion used in the UK is the ICD-10 (International Classification of Diseases, Mental Disorders Section).
However, not one of these 'diseases' has any test or any physical, chemical or biological evidence to prove that it exists as an actual disease. Certainly there are symptoms. But unlike the medical profession, which will be able to provide scientific proof of a disease (after examining the symptoms), psychiatrists are unable to do this.
