The Myth of Mental Illness

Psychiatry Should Be the Study of Personal Conduct

Psychiatry is traditionally defined as a medical specialty focused on diagnosing and treating mental diseases. However, this definition relies on a foundational error: the idea that mental illness exists as a physical entity. In the history of science, people often imagine mysterious substances—like alchemy’s hidden elements—before they understand the actual processes at work. Modern psychiatry remains stuck in this phase, using medical language to describe what are actually human interventions and social interactions. If we look at what psychiatrists actually do rather than what they say, we find they are not treating biological organs but are communicating through language, signs, and rules.

To understand psychiatry as a science, we must move away from entities like neurosis or psychosis and toward processes. This shift requires an operational approach, where concepts are defined by the actual actions performed. When a psychiatrist works with a patient, they are primarily engaged in talking and analyzing communications. By calling this treatment for a disease, the profession medicalizes human behavior to gain social authority. In reality, the study of human sign-using behavior has more in common with linguistics, philosophy, and ethics than with the physics and chemistry that underpin real medicine.

A major obstacle to this understanding is the doctrine of historicism, which suggests that human conduct is strictly determined by past events, much like physical objects are governed by laws of cause and effect. This view, championed by thinkers like Freud and Marx, suggests that people are swept into the future by irresistible forces—whether they be the unconscious or economic structures. This deterministic model negates the roles of freedom, choice, and responsibility. In truth, human behavior is voluntaristic. While past experiences influence us, they do not cause behavior in a mechanical sense. Historicist theories often function as secular religions, providing a sense of security in an unpredictable world by claiming that human life follows unchangeable laws.

If we strip away the medical comparisons, psychiatry becomes the study of personal conduct. Its true purpose is to describe and explain the social strategies people play with themselves and others—the roles they adopt, the rules they follow, and the goals they seek to achieve. This approach connects psychiatry to ethics, asking how a person lives and how they ought to live. These are moral problems, not medical ones, and they cannot be solved through prescriptions or clinical procedures.

The history of mental illness illustrates how these concepts were invented rather than discovered. Until the mid-nineteenth century, illness meant a physical deformity or a detectable change in bodily structure. Modern psychiatry changed this by creating a new category: functional illness. This allowed physicians to classify people who behaved strangely or complained of pain without physical cause as sick. Conversion hysteria became the prototype for this. While a disease like paresis was proven to be a structural brain disorder through pathology, hysteria was simply declared a disease by decree. By labeling behavioral problems as illnesses, society removed the element of will. The mentally ill were seen as victims of forces beyond their control, making them not responsible for their actions. This led to the logical absurdity where even malingering—the deliberate faking of illness—is sometimes classified as a mental disease. When we stop viewing these behaviors as medical conditions and start viewing them as forms of nonverbal communication or interpersonal strategies, we see them for what they are: complex ways of following rules and navigating social environments to achieve specific ends, such as control or protection.