Sunday, March 21, 2010

How do I get confused with Digby Tantam?

Tom Szasz in his new book Antipsychiatry: Quackery squared quotes my critical psychiatry website page on 'What was antipsychiatry?' but attributes it to Digby Tantam, not me. What I wrote was, "A key understanding of 'anti-psychiatry' is that mental illness is a myth (Szasz 1972)." Szasz objects to this because he is not an anti-psychiatrist. However, unfortunately for him, it is true that he has been identified with anti-psychiatry, and the myth of mental illness is a key idea that is associated with it.

I don't feel too bad about Szasz's criticism as he calls RD Laing an anti-psychiatrist, and Laing disowned the term, like Szasz.

He also complains that I put the date of his The myth of mental illness book as 1972, because of course it was first published in 1961. I did this because I was referring to the Paladin edition, which was first published in 1972.