It is astonishing to read in The Psychiatrist the coarse, ignorant and abusive screed by Edward Shorter as a commentary on the 50th anniversary of Szasz’s scholarly book, The Myth of Mental Illness.

The book contains ‘bombast’, Shorter declares, and ‘cock-eyed belligerence.’ Portentously, Shorter explains that: ‘in the way of its fraudulent notions’, and those of the movie One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, along with the anti-psychiatrist writings of Foucault, Laing and Cooper (who actually were quite unconnected with Szasz, his book, and the film) people decided not to seek psychiatric help and ‘many died by suicide’ instead for which the ‘anti-psychiatry gurus’ were therefore responsible.

Shorter cites no published evidence for this demonising of Szasz and the anti-psychiatrists and in fact there is none to cite. If this were not enough, Shorter goes on to make pronouncements about psychoanalysis, which he declares is dead. Does he mean dead in Toronto where he lives, or worldwide? Either way his pronouncement is nonsense I am personally acquainted with psychiatrists in academe in Toronto who are very much involved with and practise psychoanalysis. Also, I live in Italy, where psychoanalysis is alive and well as ever.