Recent find on Szasz.

http://www.szasz.com/critics.htm

Most of Szasz's ideas of the mythical nature of mental illness have been rendered obsolete by genetic studies, imagin, cross-cultural anthropology and the like. While many legal scholars see him as important to that field, the damage he has done to care of the mentally ill has not been carefully assessed and cannot be overestimated. Well-meaning but misguided advocates following his leads have trashed mental health delivery systems in state after state and have clearly contributed to the adversarialization of the mental health advocacy systems. More clearly venal forces from Ronald Reagan to Scientology have been able to draw on his "teachings" to support their causes, again to the detriment of patients.

My own view is that he was popular as a sixties kind of guy, an anti-establishment rebel where the facts he distored were not a problem for the political force of his claims; any smidgin of value he could have had is long eclipsed...

Thomas G. Gutheil, MD.

"Now, more than three decades later, Scheff, Szasz, Laing, and their colleagues are no longer fixtures in psychology and sociology courses. Most college and graduate students have never heard of them or their argument that mental illness is a socially derived myth. Academic critics have picked their arguments apart, and though Szasz, for one, is entirely unrepentant, many theorists who denied the existence of mental illness three decades ago are somewhat embarrassed now about their former beliefs. (p.7) . . . The most extreme views of this sort--often called 'anti-psychiatry'--would have led to much more sweeping changes than actually occurred. Civil commitment would have been abolished rather than restructured, voluntary as well involuntary treatment would have been prohibited . . . " (pp. 213-214). --P.S. Appelbaum. Almost a Revolution: Mental Health Law and the Limits of Change. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994

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