Thomas Szasz and his view

“Myth of mental illness”[edit]
“Mental illness” is an expression, a metaphor that describes an offending, disturbing, shocking, or vexing conduct, action, or pattern of behavior, such as schizophrenia, as an “illness” or “disease”. Szasz wrote: “If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic.”[11] He maintained that, while people behave and think in disturbing ways, and those ways may resemble a disease process (pain, deterioration, response to various interventions), this does not mean they actually have a disease. To Szasz, disease can only mean something people “have,” while behavior is what people “do”. Diseases are “malfunctions of the human body, of the heart, the liver, the kidney, the brain” while “no behavior or misbehavior is a disease or can be a disease. That’s not what diseases are.”

I think it is fair to say that he was wrong. Schizophrenia is a disease. It has many biological correlates and genes that trigger it, so reducing it all down to a choice of behavior is way too simplistic. It also has detrimental and irreversible effects on most people who suffer from it.

i don’t agree with some of his views, but other views i do 100%