This is a unique collection of topical essays about what the author calls "one of the grandest illusions of our age, mental illness, and the quixotic crusade against it". Pivoting his analysis on news-making events, Szasz exposes the fallacies of our present penchant for interpreting the behaviour of 'sane' persons as goal-directed and therefore sensible, and the behaviour of 'insane' persons as caused by a 'mental illness' and therefore senseless. In a series of diverse short pieces, originally published in newspapers and magazines, the author shows us that individual liberty and responsibility are indivisible, and that we cannot protect ourselves against coercive psychiatry's threats to liberty so long as we persist in using psychiatric ideas and interventions to evade responsibility.
