The myth of mental illness: 50 years later
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Fifty years ago I noted that modern psychiatry rests on a basic conceptual error – the systematic misinterpretation of unwanted behaviours as the diagnoses of mental illnesses pointing to underlying neurological diseases susceptible to pharmacological treatments. I proposed instead that we view persons called ‘mental patients' as active players in real life dramas, not passive victims of pathophysiological processes outside their control. In this essay, I briefly review the recent history of this culturally validated medicalisation of (mis)behaviours and its social consequences.
In my essay ‘The myth of mental illness’, published in 1960, and in my book of the same title which appeared a year later, I stated my aim forthrightly: to challenge the medical character of the concept of mental illness and to reject the moral legitimacy of the involuntary psychiatric interventions it justifies. Reference Szasz 1,Reference Szasz 2 I proposed that we view the phenomena formerly called ‘psychoses’ and ‘neuroses’, now simply called ‘mental illnesses’, as behaviours that disturb or disorient others or the self; reject the image of the patients as the helpless victims of pathobiological events outside their control; and withdraw from participating in coercive psychiatric practices as incompatible with the foundational moral ideals of free societies.
