ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the difference between illness and mental illness to the difference between a genuine work of art and its imitation. J. R. Smythies, a prominent British psychiatrist, uses this criterion to diagnose James Joyce and Ludwig Wittgenstein as mentally/neurologically ill. Like a thick fog, professional mental health jargon prevents and protects us from seeing the futility of life and the limitations of the human condition. Preoccupation with mental health and ill health, reflected in contemporary American English, is a novel and peculiarly American phenomenon. The publication of Rudolf Virchow's Cellular Pathology in 1858 signalled the birth of medicine as a profession based on modern science. Eugen Bleuler's invention of the idea of schizophrenia in 1911 completed the psychiatric transformation of language from a distinctively human characteristic into just another biological marker of brain disease. In the eighteenth century, physicians only suspected that insanity was a genuine illness; they are sure of it.
