ABSTRACT
WHAT IS MEANT by mental ill-health? To me, at least, the most concrete concept of mental ill-health is a derangement of the capacity to make co-operative relationships with other human beings. Medical studies and pathology are concerned with function and dysfunction, of which psychiatrists study in particular the capacity to make relationships with other people. This is not the whole of psychiatry, but it is, in a sense, its centre, and a very large proportion of psychiatric troubles are manifestly defects in the capacity to make relationships.
