Thomas Szasz is one of the most disliked names in contemporary psychiatry, and The Myth of Mental Illness is one of the most disapproved of books. It was Szasz's contention that illness can affect only the body and that there can be no such thing as an illness of the mind. He described mental illness as a metaphorical illness, maintaining that one can speak of a 'sick’ mind only in the same way as one can speak of a 'sick’ joke or a 'sick’ economy. He went on to argue that, if there is no mental illness, there can be no treatment for it, and no cure of it. There was, for him therefore, no medical, moral, or legal justification for involuntary psychiatric intervention or hospital admission. Such actions he considered to be crimes against humanity. He believed, after John Stuart Mill, that a man's body and soul are his own and not the state's, and that each individual has the right to do with his body whatever he pleases so long as it does not harm anyone else or infringe anybody else's rights.