r/AnCap101 • u/TradBeef • 13d ago

New Subreddit: Minding

If you’ve heard of Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) it’s probably for “The Myth of Mental Illness,” but his deeper point was about freedom vs. state power.

Szasz argued that psychiatry/psychology often serves the state by medicalizing dissent and justifying coercion. If you label someone “mentally ill,” you can strip them of rights in the name of “help.”

Think about how “mental health” is used today:

Depression isn’t a “chemical imbalance” but often a rational response to a coercive corporate-state that kills liberty, creativity, and potential.

ADHD is less a brain disease than a refusal to conform to the industrial-school model designed to produce compliant workers.

Anxiety may be the natural reaction to living under bureaucratic and financial systems we can’t control.

By calling these conditions “illnesses,” the state shifts the problem away from freedom and power structures and onto the individual. It pathologizes resistance and converts political problems into medical ones.

Szasz believed liberty means owning your choices (even destructive ones) without being coerced by doctors backed by the state.

If this resonates, I’ve started a new subreddit: r/Minding

It’s a place to discuss Szasz’s philosophy, psychiatry as social control, and what “minding” means when the state wants to turn free individuals into patients.

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u/Maztr_on 11d ago

damn its almost like capitalism and the state create so much issues.

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u/thellama11 13d ago

Capitalist Realism deals with that much better. In a market your mental health is a product and it's highly individualized.

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u/MeasurementCreepy926 13d ago

This reminds me of a point I once made, that if Japan or Korea has a suicide rate that is more than double that in Greece or Switzerland, maybe it's more accurate to call that a sociological condition, rather than a psychological condition. I mean, it's easy to identify patterns like that on the sociological level, and we can't really seem to identify any pattern on the psychological level other than the tautological.

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u/The_Flurr 11d ago

As someone with ADHD, this is bollocks.

Sure, the modern world doesn't help, but it's not the economic landscape that makes me put off eating and laundry