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:
“Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there.... Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words.”
—Italo Calvino (1923–1985)
“Mental violence has no potency and injures only the person whose thoughts are violent. It is otherwise with mental non-violence. It has potency which the world does not yet know.”
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948)