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:
“... if, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal, that we can understand our past through a male lens—if we are unaware that women even have a history—we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“All that remains to the mother in modern consumer society is the role of scapegoat; psychoanalysis uses huge amounts of money and time to persuade analysands to foist their problems on to the absent mother, who has no opportunity to utter a word in her own defence. Hostility to the mother in our societies is an index of mental health.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)