Mental illness as myth.

• Author: Vatz, Richard E.
• Position: THERAPEUTIC THEORY

DR. THOMAS S. SZASZ HAS died. He was best known as the ultraprolific critic of psychiatric theory and practice, famously penning his seminal work, The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct, in the early 1960s. He was a mentor of ours and a good friend.

We wrote a description of Dr. Szasz's ideas three years ago to which he gave his imprimatur with a characteristic "This is very well framed. Many thanks!": "The critical underpinnings of [Szasz's] corpus are as follows: that human behavioral differences are vast, goal-oriented, and evidence of the best and worst possibilities of agency. To reinterpret the less common of these behaviors in the metaphors of medicine is to take away human purpose, human responsibility, and to mystify people into believing that statistically unusual human behaviors are other than they seem and understandable and correctly acted upon only by professional, credentialed doctors and 'behavioral specialists,' e.g., psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers."

We have been teaching Szaszian perspectives in our classes and writing about them in scholarly and popular journals, magazines, and newspapers for more than 40 years. Students typically are fascinated by his perspectives and wonder why they had not heard them before. More times than we can recount, these students in response to Szasz's ideas express a reaction of "Eureka!" and, in fact, cite Szasz's theories to issue a point of gratitude to the effect that they feel they have gained (or regained) control over their lives.

One of our young students, now in her 30s, wrote to one of us regarding the insights Szasz's writings have provided her as well as some observations on how society has suffered by the abjuring of individual responsibility and the implicit need to have professional caretakers for most of life's problems: "The acceptance of mental illness and medicating normality is more prolific than you know--perhaps even more than Dr. Szasz knows. If you didn't write against the paradigm of behavioral problems as illness (as I don't), you would hear many more stories from friends and others about the medications they take and extensive counseling they've had for regular person problems.

"I think the idea of counseling has really taken a toll on friendships, too. I think to myself, when someone tells me they are in counseling, 'You know that I am your friend, and I would be happy to talk about things that trouble you once a...