Two fields dominate finding and pointing out general truths : philosophy and science but their methods are different. So it is not smart to mix Social Science and philosophy unless you are dealing with Marxism which is more than just a philosophy. He did mention Marxism but it wasn't his focus.

Also, there are plenty of sociological works critical of Psychiatry already and I would recommend "Psychiatric Hegemony : A Marxist Theory of Mental of Mental Illness" by Bruce M.Z. Cohen.

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Psychiatry is a fundamentally political project masquerading as a medical specialty and as scientific. It's impossible for Psychiatry to be scientific because it can only make historically and culturally bound propositions about it's patients or subjects. History is chronotopic which is the opposite of science and philosophy etc...

"What one thinks psychiatrists are up to depends crucially on what one thinks their patients are up to; and the latter question cannot be answered without taking an essentially political stand on what constitutes a “reasonable” response to a social situation."

Ingelby, D. (1980) ‘Understanding “Mental Illness”’, in Ingelby, D. (Ed.), Critical Psychiatry: The Politics of Mental Health (pp. 23–71). New York: Pantheon Books.

"Psychiatric diagnosis can be understood as functioning as a political device, in the sense that it legitimates a particular social response to aberrant behaviour of various sorts, but protects that response from any democratic challenge.”

Moncrieff, J. (2010) ‘Psychiatric Diagnosis as a Political Device’, Social Theory & Health, 8(4): 370–382.

So what is the real purpose of psychiatry in the Capitalist system ?

The capitalist class seeks to avoid responsibility for the many problems it causes, so it frames pain and suffering as somehow natural and inevitable. Psychiatry supports capitalism by ‘diagnosing’ socially-created problems as individual cognitive or biological defects, providing pseudoscientific ‘evidence’ for blaming the victims of the system. To use Erving Goffman’s metaphor, if capitalism is a con game, then the role of psychiatry is to ‘cool the losers’ of the system so they don’t squawk, expose the con, and take their revenge.

The medications 'work' by sedating or 'cooling off' the losers of the Capitalist system.

Schizophrenia obviously does not exist. The unlearned masses may be dazzled by scientific sounding Greek and Latin terms but men of high capacity are not fooled. Many people mistake knowing the name of something for understanding something :

"Psychiatric insiders have openly admitted the lack of science to their area of operations. Allen Frances (cited in Whitaker and Cosgrove 2015: 61), for example, has recently stated that the mental disorders given in the DSM are “better understood as no more than currently convenient constructs or heuristics that allow [psychiatrists] to communicate with one another.” This has included the classic constructs of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (formerly manic-depression), of which the mental health researcher Joel Paris at the Department of Psychiatry, McGill University, has admitted “[i]n reality, we do not know whether [such] conditions … are true diseases” (cited in Whitaker and Cosgrove 2015: 61). Even National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) director and strong advocate of biomedical psychiatry, Thomas Insel (cited in Masson 2015: xii), announced on the release of the DSM-5 in 2013 that the categories of mental disorder lacked validity and NIMH would no longer be using such diagnoses for research purposes.Despite the claims to “progress” made by official historians of psychiatry such as Lieberman and Shorter, there is no evidence for the supposed “science” of psychiatry. There is no test for any mental illness, no proof of causation, no evidence of successful “treatment” that relates specifically to an individual disorder, and no accurate prediction of future cases. Thus, the claim that psychiatric constructs are real disease has not been proven. Consequently, it is necessary to utilise the existing evidence to more accurately theorise the real vocation of the psy-professions in capitalist society."

Cohen, B.: "Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness" Palgrave- MacMillan

Bruce studied sociology in the north of England in the 1990s, and worked as a post-doctorate researcher at both the Humboldt University in Berlin and the University of South Australia in Adelaide in the early 2000s, before becoming a full-time academic in Sociology at the University of Auckland in 2008. With thirty years social research experience, he has undertaken empirical work on topics such as mental health user meanings of illness, community-based youth music projects, police perceptions of drug users, alternatives to psychiatric hospitalisation, migrant labour markets, female perceptions of crime and safety, and the criminalisation of ‘legal highs’. He has published over 40 academic books, articles, and chapters to date.

I wonder if you are creating a more black and white version of the position given making it easier to dismiss - the suggestion isn't that all mental illness is only a tool for capitalist exploitation but that the system of responding to mental distress is vulnerable to being used that way with numerous features, like the DSM and professional activities /treatments, having been so influenced that they become blunted, useless or - often - worse by only emphasising the individual. Asking whether a particular condition (like schizophrenia or depression) exists as defined is different than saying the symptomology doesn't exist. The implication is that we should do a far better job of "carving nature at the joints" in our categorisation and redefine the meaning of symptomologies and recognise social causes of distress, working on those, rather than blaming individuals for not being able to respond well to the craziness of their situation. Working to improve society and our group-think doesn't require that we locate all distress in social ills but that we should not deepen their harm by pretending the solution lies with adjusting individuals to better tolerate misery in miserable conditions. A therapy that supports the client would be working to change those conditions as well as empowering the client to do so themselves.

Schizophrenia obviously is a nonsensical category so is not valid. It was obvious to psychologist Don Bannister, back in 1968, that DSM criteria makes schizophrenia “a concept so diffuse as to be unusable in a scientific context.” Specifically, it is possible for one individual to be diagnosed with schizophrenia based on two symptoms that are completely different than the two symptoms of another individual similarly diagnosed.

It is also cannot be reliably assessed by clinicians with a kappa score of .46 and not .70 or above.

Much of what is considered a delusion is culturally and politically based and there are many high functioning people considered sane , by society, who 'hear voices'.

Schizophrenia does not exist it is just a wastebasket for disturbing behavior.

Also, people diagnosed with 'mental illness' have better recovery rates in 'third world' countries. My guess is because they are not exposed to the toxic Western psychiatric establishment.

Nope, the author of the piece is a clinical psychologist so is considered by society to be more 'authoritative' on the issue. I attended a college in the State University of New York system for computer science. However, I know more about science and philosophy than the average person. In relation to this subreddit I am mostly familiar with Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein and Marx but read just one of Nietzsche's books.

I am not that impressed by the article too much. The Enlightenment, that Spinoza was a part of, was a movement of a growing and confident middle class or petite bourgeoisie. It seems out of place in late Capitalist society.

I prefer the Marxist analyses of Mental Illness.