Lew Rockwell podcasts with 88-year-old Dr. Thomas Szasz, the legendary libertarian mental health theorist and "leading opponent of the psychiatry profession as it exists in league with the state."

Szasz reiterates the views he first articulated in his controversial 1961 book, The Myth of Mental Illness, that "the concept of mental illness," as commonly understood and diagnosed, "undermines the principle of personal responsibility, the ground on which all free political institutions rest."

Here's a sample of the interview:

Szasz: Psychiatry developed about 300 years ago as an arm of the law. Its actual purpose was always to get rid of unwanted people - unwanted in any way, because they were a nuisance, because they were deviant or because they were poor, or if they were rich, because they upset their families, and so on.

...

Rockwell: I notice that the Obama administration, in wanting to increase the amount of socialized medicine in this country, wants to vastly increase the subsidization of psychiatry. That seems to me an alarming prospect.

Szasz: If you look at what has happened in the last 100 years or 50 years in the United States, you will notice one thing: There is absolutely no difference between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, when it comes to two subjects - mental illness and incarceration on the one hand, and drug laws on the other. One of the major reasons people end up in mental health care is (due to) the violation of the drug laws. If there were no drug laws - which there were none until 1906 or 1916, depending on how you want to date it - then there would be no drug violations. It would be a private matter between the person himself and his family.

...

Rockwell: What is mental illness?

Szasz: It is behavior that other people dislike. That was essentially Mark Twain's definition of addiction - taking a drug that other people disapprove of.

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Rockwell: The government, the psychiatry profession and the psychology profession seem to keep finding new definitions of mental illness.

Szasz: Once you get into that language, you have already capitulated. There is no mental illness, there is no psychiatric diagnosis, no psychiatric treatment. These are words - words used by more powerful people against less powerful people in the name of helping them, but actually to control them or to punish them, or both.