Brain Disorders or Problems with Living? How Research on “Mental Illness” Went Awry

Brain Disorders or Problems with Living? How Research on “Mental Illness” Went Awry

By the end of the 1970’s, psychiatry was facing a crisis of identity that threatened its very existence. Books such as The Myth of Mental Illness by Thomas Szasz and The Death of Psychiatry by E. Fuller Torrey argued that the very concept of mental illness was meaningless. The Rosenhan Experiment had convinced many that psychiatrists could not distinguish the sane from the insane. To many, the tired old dogmas of Herr Doktor Freud seemed about a…