The Myth of Mental Illness Revisited: Language Matters

Abstract

The safety of the American public has been violated by a mental health treatment enterprise that is badly broken because it is based on a fundamentally flawed model of understanding distress and dysfunction. The system has generated language that has caused serious confusion among the public as well as the providers of mental health services. And language matters. Psychologists have drifted from their core identity and contributed significantly to this system by embracing the illness model as if it was their own. In their philosophical confusion feeding a myopic neuroscience zeitgeist, proponents of this flawed model and broken system have minimized the influence of psychological factors and emboldened a psychopharmaceutical industry that is now dangerously in control of the country’s mental health needs. Unless psychologists scrutinize the language on which they have become dependent and the practices dictated by that language, the broken system will be irreparable and the level of harm perpetrated on the American public will escalate from dangerous to perilous. Psychology is a unique basic science discipline among the mental health professions, and there is a faint pulse in the scientist–practitioner model of clinical psychology suggesting perhaps a glimmer of hope. Historians will not be kind to this era, and psychology will be found deeply culpable unless a major paradigm shift is achieved soon. Change cannot be accomplished without a complete rejection of the illness model and action to replace it in similar fashion to what is already under way in Great Britain.