MENTAL ILLNESS OR PHYSICAL ILLNESS?

MENTAL ILLNESS OR PHYSICAL ILLNESS? This essay elegantly summarizes how the idea of mental illness has changed through the last fifty years. Reading it, I kept reflecting how much of the intellectual history and the literature of that period was influenced by the changing concept of mental illness. Progress has come by acknowledging how little is known. Two sentences I especially liked: “The difference between a medical diagnosis and a psychiatric diagnosis thus has less to do with the patient’s symptoms and more to do with how much the doctor understands the illness. Every so-called ‘physical’ symptom imaginable has at one time or another been termed psychogenic by eager theorizers, and when the physiological basis of a patient’s mental symptom is revealed, like the secret compartment in a magician’s cabinet, the flamboyant madness evaporates, leaving behind a leaden residue of organ damage and biochemistry.”