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:
“To get time for civic work, for exercise, for neighborhood projects, reading or meditation, or just plain time to themselves, mothers need to hold out against the fairly recent but surprisingly entrenched myth that “good mothers” are constantly with their children. They will have to speak out at last about the demoralizing effect of spending day after day with small children, no matter how much they love them.”
—Wendy Coppedge Sanford. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, introduction (1978)
“The vast results obtained by Science are won by no mystical faculties, by no mental processes other than those which are practiced by every one of us, in the humblest and meanest affairs of life. A detective policeman discovers a burglar from the marks made by his shoe, by a mental process identical with that by which Cuvier restored the extinct animals of Montmartre from fragments of their bones.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)