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Greetings -- I write as a visitor to this thread to share appreciation of the need to question the medical model of mental  illness.  My own education in this questioning was advanced significantly when I read Thomas Szasz's  1960 book "The Myth of Mental Illness."  In it, Szasz writes, " When you call a rock a rock, nothing happens to it; but when you call a person a schizophrenic, something happens to him."  Anyone who has been or who has loved someone in the mental health care system has a feeling for this.  It definitely connects with the isolating, dominating, totalizing, and diminishing of people that Paul references above.  To Paul's highlighting its "tendency to dissociate people from the larger culture," I would add that the medical model obscures the ways in which people's suffering is itself a manifestation of that culture, makes cultural sense -- not always, but I think often.