[Perspectives] Thomas Szasz: rebel with a questionable cause

Thomas Szasz challenged mental health practice perhaps more than any other American psychiatrist in the decades after World War 2. He did so by turning against his own specialty. In addition to contemporaries R D Laing in the UK, the Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman, and the French philosopher Michel Foucault, Szasz provided much of the high octane intellectual fuel for the genesis of the anti-psychiatry movement that burgeoned on both sides of the Atlantic during the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, Szasz promoted doubts about whether mental illness existed at all with his publication of The Myth of Mental Illness in 1961 and The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement in 1970, along with many other writings, lectures, and public app...

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