Insanity and chess ratings

Hey, I wonder if you can get a certificate like a master of insanity?

Grandmasters are just nuts

Could be, I've never hung out with a chess grandmaster.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Szasz

"Myth of mental illness"

"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."[12] 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." Szasz cited drapetomania as an example of a behavior that many in society did not approve of, being labeled and widely cited as a disease. Likewise, women who did not bend to a man's will were said to have hysteria.[13] He thought that psychiatry actively obscures the difference between behavior and disease in its quest to help or harm parties in conflicts. He maintained that, by calling people diseased, psychiatry attempts to deny them responsibility as moral agents in order to better control them.

In Szasz's view, people who are said by themselves or others to have a mental illness can only have, at best, a "fake disease." Diagnoses of "mental illness" or "mental disorder" (the latter expression called by Szasz a "weasel term" for mental illness) are passed off as "scientific categories" but they remain merely judgments (judgments of disdain) to support certain uses of power by psychiatric authorities. In that line of thinking, schizophrenia is not the name of a disease entity but a judgment of extreme psychiatric and social reprobation. Szasz called schizophrenia "the sacred symbol of psychiatry" because those so labeled have long provided and continue to provide justification for psychiatric theories, treatments, abuses, and reforms.

Sorry for the lateness. Well, we can't get solid results without the scientific method. 

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He wouldn't be a Scientologist, would he?

Why can't behaviour be a symptom of the disease?

There can be real diseases, for instance, a brain tumor or a viral infecton, that may cause erratic behavior.

But what Szasz is claiming, is that human behavior, for most cases,  is not a disease. It may be difficult for other people, emotionally or financially or a stress on their time; or it may not be socially unworkable, a spanner in the works etc; but that does not mean the human is diseased. 

That is a rating given by others.

The action can be harmful to the self etc, but in the case it is not harming anyone, then it is simply that Society is not willing to put with the behaviour. 

And Psychiatry is simply an institution that is a mechanism that socializes people, so that they can fit in.

In fact all institutions do that. 

I think Giles and Deleuze in their book about Capitalism and Schizophrenia, says that, Schizophrenia, for some might be a legitimate reaction to certain societal structures. (I think I might be misinterpreting here..).

However, if we accept this, then the society that led one to insanity is the one demanding, through psychiatry, to change oneself and fit in. That is, they try to pass off the poison  as the antidote. It is the social structures that caused the problems, and it is same social agents, that offer, the problem as salvation.

So psychiatry might not be the solution is some cases. It is, of course, a solution for us, because we fear for out safety, and it get rids of the problem, by locking it up.

But it may not be the best thing for the patient.

Thomas Stephen Szasz  was a psychiatrist and academic, a Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association, a professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York, and starting in 1990, he was professor emeritus of psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse.

Ayn Rand had no professional accreditation. 

I don't think you understand him, or Rand; and why they are different. F..k this or that, is not an argument. 

That's some crazy sh#t, professor.

It's my fault, sometimes I don't think too well and start insensitive threads. Sorry

That's 'cause you're insane.

Huh?

Can you repeat that?

I've seen a chupacabra, and that's not what it looked like

Are you Dr. Hyde?