The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct is a 1961 book by Thomas Szasz. Perhaps the best known argument against the tendency of psychiatrists to label people who are "disabled by living" as mentally ill, it was described by David Cooper as "a decisive, carefully documented demystification of psychiatric diagnostic labelling in general." Richard Webster notes that some of Szasz's arguments are similar to his, but that their views of hysteria and the work of Jean-Martin Charcot are quite different, since Szasz assumes that hysteria was an emotional problem and that Charcot's patients were not genuinely mentally ill.
The book criticized psychiatry and provided an intellectual foundation for mental patient advocates and anti-psychiatry activists. It became very well known in the mental health professions and was well received by those sceptical of modern psychiatry, but made Szasz an enemy of many doctors. Szasz said that involuntary commitment and other coercive treatments were unethical and unscientific.
Famous quotes containing the words myth and/or mental:
“How then can we account for the persistence of the myth that inside the empty nest lives a shattered and depressed shell of a woman—a woman in constant pain because her children no longer live under her roof? Is it possible that a notion so pervasive is, in fact, just a myth?”
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“It is a monstrous thing to force a child to learn Latin or Greek or mathematics on the ground that they are an indispensable gymnastic for the mental powers. It would be monstrous even if it were true.”
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