Well said, Steven. I love that quip by Szasz, and I have long admired and "followed," as it were, his great little book. Indeed, I paraphrase him in my introductory essay to A Gathered Distance: "Living disables us, sooner or later." I teach my Literary Journalism students a wonderful review essay by Jerome Groopman, from the New Yorker from a few years back. You don't need to read it, having covered off on this so well, but you may enjoy it: Jerome Groopman, “The Troubled History of Psychiatry,” The New Yorker, 20 May 2019; https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/27/the-troubled-history-of-psychiatry. (A Gather Distance, by the way, is very largely a cluster of poems dealing with grief. And on Thursday I lost my mother, on Monday we bury her; I am about to take the journey again.)
An excellent explanation of the ludicrous shift towards labelling every human emotion or condition as an 'illness'.
Well said, Steven. I love that quip by Szasz, and I have long admired and "followed," as it were, his great little book. Indeed, I paraphrase him in my introductory essay to A Gathered Distance: "Living disables us, sooner or later." I teach my Literary Journalism students a wonderful review essay by Jerome Groopman, from the New Yorker from a few years back. You don't need to read it, having covered off on this so well, but you may enjoy it: Jerome Groopman, “The Troubled History of Psychiatry,” The New Yorker, 20 May 2019; https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/27/the-troubled-history-of-psychiatry. (A Gather Distance, by the way, is very largely a cluster of poems dealing with grief. And on Thursday I lost my mother, on Monday we bury her; I am about to take the journey again.)