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Battling the wrong enemy!

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

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Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 2011

Dr Shorter’s ad hominem attack on Professor Szasz provides no convincing argument against Szasz’s well-known position concerning what he regards as the spurious medicalisation of mental illness. Nor will there be wide agreement with Shorter that neuroscientific studies suggesting a ‘neurological basis for much psychiatric illness’ negate Szasz’s firmly held beliefs.

It is regrettable that Dr Shorter missed the opportunity to remind our colleagues that the rampant misuse of psychiatry 50 years ago as described by Szasz is applicable to the way institutional psychiatry is practised today in many parts of the USA, Canada and the UK, and certainly in most of the other countries in the world.

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