Some More Stories (fables?) About Psycho"therapy" and "Mental Health"

The Stories We Live By

I have written extensively and spoken on my blogtalkradio podcasts about the myth of mental illness and the nature of mental health. The terms mental illness and mental disorders have nothing to do with real medical illness but in fact are bad names professionals call people dressed up as medical problems. I have argued that psychotherapy has nothing to do with medicine, that psychiatry is a humbug and dangerously authoritarian and unless those of us who practice psychotherapy divest ourselves of our relationship with the psychiatric medical model we will fail to live up the the promise of what our field can be. Psychotherapy is a proud product of the enlightenment, science, humanism and the rise of democracy and I believe is best understood as a noncoercive form of personal education of the self and its relationship to society. I am writing still another book on what I call psycho"therapy" and have hit a wall on my proposed chapter on "mental health." On today's broadcast I will ruminate outloud on the nature of mental health. If mental illnesses are moral judgments on how others should not live then mental health must be judgments on how others should live. How does that work and who dares to know and tell others the right and moral way to live their lives? How and why should the field of mental health and psychotherapy even exist?