by Edward A. Dreyfus

About the author: Edward A. Dreyfus is a clinical psychologist in private practice in the Los Angeles-Santa Monica area of California.

Many mental health practitioners are promoting the notion that alcohol abuse, drug abuse, overeating, gambling, anorexia, bulimia and smoking are diseases. By using the disease model, its proponents believe that people are more apt to seek help because having an “illness” is more acceptable than having psychological or behavior disorder. I am reminded of the effects of saying that people with emotional difficulties were “sick,” and suffering from a “disease.” Psychology and psychiatry moved a long way forward when we listened to Thomas Szasz declare that mental illness was a myth, to Karl Menninger discussing degrees of personality organization, and to Benjamin Rush when he spoke of problems...