Thomas Szasz based his outright rejection of mental illness on the fact that there were no pathological findings that supported it. His views also had a social and political element – by labeling certain behaviors as psychiatric disorders requiring medical treatment, psychiatry was being used as a means of controlling people. Szasz believed that this practice was occurring both in the so-called ‘Free World’ and under dictatorships.
The idea behind the book, called “The Anti-Psychiatry Movement”, was that psychiatric treatment should focus on the patient’s environment rather than focusing on their brain chemistry. In 1961, psychiatrist Thomas Szasz wrote a book about the subject. His book argued against what he saw as the medicalization of society and the misuse of medication to treat problems that do not exist. Many psychologists supported the notion, and in the 1960s, an anti-psychiatry movement gained momentum, led by psychiatrists such as R D Laing and David Cooper in Britain. Laing took Szaz’s ideas further, saying that Psychiatry diagnoses mental illness from behavioral symptoms and not physiologically. He was opposed to psychiatric medication and invasive surgery, arguing they should examine the social and economic factors which he claimed cause mental distress.
