Bryan Caplan has written a thought provoking paper building on Thomas Szasz’s work to argue that most mental illness can be seen as unusual preferences rather than having a medical or pathological basis. We should not, he says, be surprised by unusual prefernces given the enormous variety of tastes out there.
I am preparing a co-authored response to his paper but in the meantime, I thought I’d start collecting episodes of unusual preferences.
This story is from last week, about the Magistrate who stole £250,000 to pay his cleaner to clean his house wearing nothing but rubber gloves. The English are known for their eccentricty, so I think Bryan’s views may get more support here than in the US, where reliance on various versions of the Twinkie defence has, in my view, corroded the image of psychiatry as a profession.
Peculiar Tastes…
Thanks to Fixed Point, I discovered both the rubber gloves story and a paper written by Bryan Caplan on mental illness and unusual preferences. The paper is avowedly the most unpublishable one that ever got past a referree, but there is much insight to…