"Our adversaries are not demons, witches, fate, or mental illness. We have no enemy whom we can fight, exorcise, or dispel by "cure." What we do have are problems in living — whether these be biologic, economic, political, or sociopsychological. In this essay I was concerned only with problems belonging in the last mentioned category, and within this group mainly with those pertaining to moral values. The field to which modern psychiatry addresses itself is vast, and I made no effort to encompass it all. My argument was limited to the proposition that mental illness is a myth, whose function it is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations."
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Academics from the United StatesJews from the United StatesHumanistsImmigrants to the United StatesPsychiatrists from the United States
Original Language: English
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"The Myth of Mental Illness" in American Psycholigist, Vol. 15 (1960), p. 115.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Szasz
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Thomas Szasz
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