OK, just started reading Hacking’s Mad Travelers. Great quote from the first chapter.
Ludwig Wittgenstein said that in psychology there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion. We have more than that for the mental illnesses. We have the clinical methods of medicine, psychiatry, psychology, we have the innumerable variants of and deviations from psychoanalysis; we have systems of self-help, group helps, and counselors including priests and gurus; we have the statistical methods of epidemiology and population genetics, and molecular biology; we have the theoretical modeling of cognitive science; and we have conceptual confusion (Hacking: 10)
I particularly like the use of the semi-colon, but that is a whole different issue…
The aim of the book appears to be the justification of the idea that the dichotomy real / constructed (or, presumably real / problems of living, though Szasz is not mentioned) is simply too simplistic to capture what is going on with these transient forms of mental illness. It goes without saying that I am sympathetic to this idea and am looking forward to seeing how Hacking runs with it. From the introduction:
The most important contribution here is the metaphor of an ecological niche within which mental illnesses thrive. Such niches require a number of vectors. I emphasis four. One, inevitably, is medical. The illness should fit into a larger framework of diagnosis, a taxonomy of illness. The most interesting vector is cultural polarity: the illness should be situated between two elements of contemporary culture, one romantic and virtuous, the other vicious and tending to crime … Then we need a vector of observability, that the disorder should be visible as disorder, as suffering as something to escape. Finally something more familiar: the illness, despite the pain it produces, should also provide some release that it is not available elsewhere in the culture in which it thrives (Hacking: 1-2)
Hacking, Ian. 1998. Mad travelers reflections on the reality of transient mental illnesses. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
affectum imitatio 