You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
THERE IS REASON believe that seeing someone as mentally ill, labeling him mentally ill, and treating him as if he were mentally ill makes him more likely to act as if he were mentally ill.
When people think someone is mentally ill, they treat him differently. They expect him to think, feel, and act strangely. They regard what he says and does as signs of illness. To tell someone with a physical disease like a tumor that he is ill does not affect the course of the disease, as far as we know; to tell someone he is mentally ill affects him and can lead him to enact his idea of mental illness.
To refuse to label certain experiences and behavior as ill is not to fail to see they may be unusual. However, what is regarded as odd or bothersome in some social circles may not be in others. Many "mentally ill" persons need time, space, and encouragement to do and be more than they have been allowed before.
Three psychiatrists in England, Drs. David Cooper, Aaron Esterson, and R. D. Laing, proposed to make this possible. With some co-workers and friends they founded the Philadelphia Association Ltd., a charity that has sponsored one household, and affiliated itself with some others, where people who had been or could be diagnosed as "mentally ill" have lived outside mental hospitals.
They chose to drop the medical model for that class of behavior for which no physical cause has been found and which is called mental illness. They believed that the medical model acts as a constraint upon