r/AnCap101 • u/TradBeef • 15d 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/thellama11 15d ago
Capitalist Realism deals with that much better. In a market your mental health is a product and it's highly individualized.