That's absolutely ridiculous. Its absurd to deny reality to preserve people's feelings. One can acknowledge that mental illness is a form of weakness without treating people poorly. The problem doesn't come from the fact that people consider mental illness as a form of weakness, but from the fact that mental illness makes people less resilient to life's trials.
Pretending there's nothing wrong with being mentally ill doesn't do anyone any favors; in fact I'd argue it's worse than acknowledgement as it may discourage treatment at least as much as the current stigma.
I think the only one being a jerk here is you. Perhaps your definition of weakness needs adjustment, since you seem to conflate it with choice.
Then in real life, some people do react that way when people have the courage to admit to it, and if people are made to believe their symptoms are a character flaw, then again, no treatment, only people feeling bad.
I didn't make this stuff up, I've seen it happen.
And it doesn't happen to people from "their weakness". It is a very jerk move, and absurd, to go anywhere near that phrasing. Just as we don't get cancer or a broken leg from being weak people.
There are correlations with genetics that can make someone predisposed etc. but it is absolutely wrong thinking to say it happens because of "weakness", it is, however unfortunate, a natural part of the spectrum of human condition.
That's too broad to remain true in all cases. You have to defined what is a weakness to what, or you're just making a meaningless laconic statement.
I have no aorta (due to a malformed aorta at birth). It's particularly good defense against an aortic dissection and guarantees no aortic aneurysm. If you have no arms or legs, good luck getting meta-carpal syndrome.
The point is that you've made a flippant comment with the misplaced expectation that it equates to wisdom.
Disagree. Some mental illnesses are temporary.
For example some people will only have a single psychotic episode that will not recur: https://www.webmd.com/schizophrenia/guide/mental-health-brie...
I imagine a lot of mental illnesses that do not involve psychosis are sometimes this way too, but this is the one that came to mind where the temporary aspect is literally part of the name.
Other than that... People can respond well to treatment, and many of the disorders are episodic, with the episodes being temporary.
Having a mental illness is not a weakness. But the problem with the term psychogenic is history teaches us it probably doesn't exist, and if it did exist, we could never truly be confident of it.
Through the history of medicine we have had illnesses come up such as Multiple Sclerosis, that contemporary medicine at the time failed to understand, and falsely believing they somehow had good enough testing at the time that if they couldn't find anything wrong with someone then there could be nothing wrong, they label it a psychogenic problem. This happened over and over and over again. You'd think medicine would learn. On top of that psychology also over history has had this weird obsession with trying to fill the void in these cases, with big psychologists/psychiatrists seemingly trying to claim new territory in the name of their field.
The idea of the functional disorder presented in the story is testable in this case. (It doesn't make sense to me given the symptoms described but assuming it did). Take these patients, send them to this magical school that they said fixes people's functional disorders, and let's see if they recover. But please do not blame any of these people if they don't recover after this treatment, as is usually what happens when the labels functional disorder and psychogenic are applied. (You're not trying hard enough, you're not believing in the cure enough, etc.)
Conversion disorder is a particularly despicable label to give someone that for some reason some neurologist still do, usually because they can't just admit they don't know what's wrong. (See Jen Brea's story.)