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From one of the most renowned and controversial thinkers in behavioral science, here is a critical examination of the way both science and society define insanity. Attacking the universally accepted psychiatric doctrines that blur the distinction between literal and metaphoric diseases, Szasz argues that insanity is not an objectively definable or identifiable condition, and presents a more fully rounded account of the insanity concept, showing how it relates to and differs from three closely allied ideas - bodily illness, social deviance and the sick role. The book reveals why it is impossible truly to understand psychiatric problems without first distinguishing an abnormal biological condition - like diabetes - from the sick role.

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Library Journal Review

Szasz is the well-known anti-psychiatric psychiatrist who first attacked the ``myth of mental illness'' 25 years ago. Several books since, including the present one, seem redundantly to echo his attack. Always a clear and accessible writer, the author has some trenchant criticisms of psychobiology, of a society perhaps too ready to excuse criminality as psychopathology, of a field filled with jargon (is ``self-actualization'' anything more than ``living life to its fullest''?). Unfortunately, such refreshing insights are buried in the overall excess of a polemic dismissing virtually all inner mental life and conflict in favor of a vague, apparently concretistic viewpoint. The book is certainly acessible to the lay public but not much of an addition to the author's previous work. Paul Hymowitz, Psychiatry Dept., Cornell Medical Ctr., New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

For more than 25 years, Szasz has been the gadfly of psychiatry-one who will not go away. Since the publication of The Myth of Mental Illness (1961), he has persistently set his views before the public. Proceeding from a sharp distinction between body and mind, between somatic disease and mental (emotional) social distress, Szasz calls attention to the logical problems in psychiatric labeling of disease, he also emphasizes the authoritarian, antihuman, state-supporting elements of psychiatric practice. Examples of psychiatric foibles are abundant. In this volume Szasz presents nothing essentially new; however, he gives a finely etched statement of his position regarding psychiatric thought; diagnostic systems and practice; and the law and medicine. Szasz's latest book will confirm and delight general readers, especially those with a critical eye for current psychiatric positions. The psychiatric establishment will dismiss this book as another polemic. The latter group might benefit from The Anatomy of Madness, 2v., ed. by W.F. Bynum, R. Porter, and M. Shepherd (CH, Jul '86) or A.W. Clare's Psychiatry in Dissent, 2nd ed. (London, 1980).-N.W. Bell, University of Toronto