WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — A co-worker recently brought in the July 15 edition of The Wall Street Journal.
"You're going to love this," he said and began reading.
"The idea that every life is infinitely precious and therefore everyone deserves the same kind of optimal medical care is a fine religious sentiment and moral ideal. As political and economic policy it is vainglorious delusion."
The author is Dr. Thomas Szasz, a renowned and often reviled psychiatrist and 89-year-old emeritus professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York in Syracuse. Szasz has spent most of his career arguing that mental illness is not a disease but a metaphor for undesirable thoughts, feelings and behaviors.
As Szasz sees it, health care should be more like car care. We pay the cost of maintaining and repairing our cars, so when it comes to our bodies, why do we believe "the community or state ought to be responsible for paying the cost of repairing them?"
Some medical problems, such as lupus and leukemia, are "involuntary, unwanted happenings." But others are the "result of voluntary, goal-directed behavior.
"Are we going to count obesity, smoking, depression and schizophrenia as the same kinds of diseases?" Szasz wrote.
As Szasz sees it, the ideal universal health-care program would compel people to avoid risks, "such as alcoholism and erectile dysfunction," or pay those costs out of pocket in exchange for a lower premium.
Honestly, I do not think that lower insurance premiums would have kept me from becoming an alcoholic. I also am fairly certain that there is no correlation between lower insurance premiums and erectile dysfunction (which is not a mental illness).
Szasz's maverick thinking was cutting-edge back in 1961, the year his book, "The Myth of Mental Illness," was published. But today, there is little doubt that mental illnesses are legitimate medical conditions.
To willfully overlook almost 50 years of research, innovation and technology — Positron Emission Tomography (PET); Computed Axial Tomography (CAT); and Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT) — is to ignore irrefutable proof that there are physiological and biological components to mental illness.
Why is that a big deal? Because these enormous scientific advances not only have created new treatments to alleviate suffering, but also have shattered the archaic dogma of those, like Szasz, who want to believe that mental illness is nothing more than a character defect of badly behaved, weak-willed people.
The mentally ill deserve the same health-care coverage as the physically ill. Science — especially neuroimaging — has proven that the brains of the mentally ill are different from healthy brains. The mentally ill are not just behaving badly. They are sick. Our brains do not regulate and make chemicals as they should, just as a diabetic's pancreas does not make the necessary amount of insulin.
Now, can we move into the 21st century?
Christine Stapleton writes for The Palm Beach Post. E-mail: christine(underscore)stapleton(at)pbpost.com. To read previous columns, go to PalmBeachPost.com/depression