Happily, there is a whole lot of middle ground between Szasz and Stahl. Considering one the alternative to the other is the equivalent of the hard core right considering anything less to be communist.
Most of them are loud because you get the most airplay by being loud and are heard way out of proportion to the value of your ideas. Stephen Pinker and Noam Chomsky were pretty cutting edge in their day and weren't nearly so shrill as what makes up most of the fringe. Pandering overproportional attention to the fringe gets in the way of actually doing valuable work. Look at the output of our current congress. But to each their own.
Meh, I don't give him as much credit. His Myth of Mental Illness in '61 basically said that mental illness as a whole is just code for what society deems as socially unacceptable. This argument was adopted by sociologists and the gay community who furthered it before Szasz came back to the theme specifically in regards to homosexuality. He paid it more attention as the gay rights movement grew. He thought all mental illness should be tossed out as a label; homosexuality's removal from the DSM was happy collateral damage.
If that's your takeaway of Szasz, you should probably re-read him as you missed his message.
