Revealing the Truth About Psychopolitics: A Critique of Anti-Psychiatry’s Leading Light
For over two decades, Thomas S Szasz has been conducting a continuous, single-minded and stylish battle against mental-health ideologies and institutions, along a gamut of media from the scholarly to the popular, between the covers of 15 books and across the pages of some hundreds of articles and reviews. Erving Goffman began his influence in counter-psychiatric theorising at the same starting point as Szasz – ie, the later Fifties – but is better known as a general sociologist of the small-scale encounter than as a theoretician of mental-health issues. RD Laing came into public attention during the psychedelic Sixties, arriving with a sensational impact that has faded given the ensuing changes in modern cultural styles and in Laing’s own personal outlook.
Michel Foucault now reigns almost supreme in the modish avant-garde of Paris, London and New York, having achieved his eminence through the passing of the revolutionary or radical social aspirations that structured intellectual life in all three centres after 1968. In these successions of ideological fortune, Szasz’s stance as a critic of psychiatry has been unwavering. He is at the same time the doyen of the movement of mental-health revisionism and the herald of the newer orthodoxies of right-wing thought on welfare in the post-collectivist epoch of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. From a position of apparent marginality, situated on the fringe of the right-libertarian grouplets associated with American individualism, Szasz has emerged as a thinker fully concordant with the mainstream of conservative thought on social policy; and, paradoxically, in his transition from fringe figure to conservative luminary, he has often received the approbation of the socialist or radical New Left, which has seriously misunderstood the implications of Szaszian anti-collectívism.
Yet any reader in the literature of mental-health revisionism will find Szasz’s work uneven, occasionally lacking even in the structure of a schematic overstatement. Two books by Szasz may be taken as the pillars of his theoretical edifice: The Myth of Mental Illness, published back in 1961, and The Manufacture of Madness, which appeared in 1970. The former consists of a fundamental attack on the logic of the concept of mental illness, in terms remote from any purchase on the actual institutions of psychiatric treatment; the latter is a critique of the operating social and political functions of psychiatric ideology.
“The Myth of Mental Illness as a whole bears something of the character of a neo-Freudian internal document”
Yet the two works fail to form a natural complement to one another. The Myth of Mental Illness is only seldom militant despite its polemical title. In the main, it fulfils the promise of its sub-title, ‘Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct’, providing a re-working of psychoanalytical categories of normal and abnormal behaviour along the lines of a game-playing model of social interaction which is zestful and insightful, but neither particularly uncommon nor particularly iconoclastic by the standards of recent social-psychosocial theorising. The text is enriched with a host of clinical and conceptual observations whose value stands independent of whether one accepts the author’s main case: that ‘mental illness’ is an invalid and perilous idea.