If you talk to God,
You are praying;
If God talks to you,
You have schizophrenia.
Prof. Thomas S. Szasz, 'The Second Sin.'
"THERE IS NO HIGHER FORM OF HUMAN ENDEAVOUR THAN TELLING THE TRUTH AND SHAMING THE DEVIL."
WALT WHITMAN (POET)
A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong.
Professor Thomas Szasz
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| Professor Thomas Ssasz - pioneering psychiatrist, leading the debate on the abuses of Psychiatry's power as agent of the state. He postulates that a 'pharmacratic dictatorship,'exists. WATCH INTERVIEW WITH HIM IN U.K. ON THE VIDEOBAR. Since 1990 he has been Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse, New York. He is a well-known social critic of the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry, and of the social control aims of medicine in modern society, as well as of scientism. His books The Myth of Mental Illness (1960) and The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1970) set out some of the arguments with which he is most associated. His views on special treatment follow from classical liberal roots which are based on the principles that each person has the right to bodily and mental self-ownership and the right to be free from violence from others, although he criticized the "Free World" as well as the communist states for their use of psychiatry and "drogophobia". He believes that suicide, the practice of medicine,taking remedies and sexual relations should be private, contractual, and outside of state jurisdiction. |
Labeling a child as mentally ill
Is stigmatization,
Not diagnosis.
Giving a child a psychiatric drug
Is poisoning,
Not treatment.
Thomas Szasz
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| People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates. Thomas Szasz |
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Many parents and professionals have concerns about psychotropic drugs use with children. No further evidence is needed to show that 'mental illness' is not the name of a biological condition whose nature awaits to be elucidated, but is the name of a concept whose purpose is to obscure the obvious.Psychiatry's main methods are those of conversation or rhetoric, repression, and religion. To the extent that psychiatry presents these problems as "medical diseases," its methods as "medical treatments," and its clients — especially involuntary — as medically ill patients, it embodies a lie and therefore constitutes a fundamental threat to freedom and dignity. Psychiatry, supported by the State through various Mental Health Acts, has become a modern secular state religion according to Thomas Szasz. It is a vastly elaborate social control system, using both brute force and subtle indoctrination, which disguises itself under the claims of scientificity. The notion that biological psychiatry is a real science or a genuine branch of medicine has been challenged by other critics as well, such as Michel Foucault in Madness and Civilization (1961), and Erving Goffman in Asylums (1961). Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence. Thomas Szasz Separation of psychiatry and the state: State government by enforcing the use of shock therapy has abused Psychiatry with impunity. If we accept that "mental illness" is a euphemism for behaviors that are disapproved of, then the state has no right to force psychiatric "treatment" on these individuals. Similarly, the state should not be able to interfere in mental health practices between consenting adults (for example, by legally controlling the supply of psychotropic drugs or psychiatric medication). The medicalization of government produces a "therapeutic state," designating someone as "insane" or as a "drug addict". Thomas Szasz Since theocracy is the rule of God or its priests, and democracy the rule of the people or of the majority, pharmacracy is therefore the rule of medicine or of doctors. Szasz has been wrongly associated with the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s and 1970s. He is not opposed to the practice of psychiatry if it is non-coercive. He maintains that psychiatry should be a contractual service between consenting adults with no state involvement.Concepts about mental illness in his view are a social consruction representing the prevailing societal views and values at the time e.g. in the USSR where political definitions existed. |
People who are said (by themselves or others) to "have" a mental illness can only have, at best, a "fake disease." Diagnoses of "mental illness" or "mental disorder" (the latter expression called by Szasz a "weasel term" for mental illness) are passed off as "scientific categories" but they remain merely judgments (judgments of disdain) to support certain uses of power by psychiatric authorities. In that line of thinking, schizophrenia is not the name of a disease entity but a judgment of extreme psychiatric and social reprobation.
Szasz consistently pays attention to the power of language in the establishment and maintenance of the social order, both in small interpersonal as well as wider socio-political spheres:
"The struggle for definition is veritably the struggle for life itself. In the typical Western two men fight desperately for the possession of a gun that has been thrown to the ground: whoever reaches the weapon first shoots and lives; his adversary is shot and dies. In ordinary life, the struggle is not for guns but for words; whoever first defines the situation is the victor; his adversary, the victim. For example, in the family, husband and wife, mother and child do not get along; who defines whom as troublesome or mentally sick?...[the one] who first seizes the word imposes reality on the other; [the one] who defines thus dominates and lives; and [the one] who is defined is subjugated and may be killed."
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