Thomas Szasz, whose 1961 book The Myth of Mental Illness revolutionized thinking about involuntary commitment, has a new book out: Coercion As Cure: A Critical History of Psychiatry.
Szasz helps people recognize how many issues portrayed solely as questions of mental health are actually questions of liberty. He has helped open the eyes of generations of Americans to the fact that merely wearing a white coat doesn’t make a person trustworthy enough to shackle other people.
George J. Annas of the Boston University Schools of Public Health, Medicine, and Law commented on Coercion As Cure: “A powerful and fittingly impassioned indictment of psychiatrists who use coercion to `treat’ patients by the psychiatrist who has done more than anyone else to challenge psychiatry to abandon the destructive use of force and replace it with consent, trust, and adherence to the Hippocratic injunction to `do no harm.'”
Keith Hoeller, the editor of Review of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry, observed, “Nearly all books on the history of psychiatry have been written by people who wholeheartedly believe in the reality of `mental illness.’ At long last we have a history of psychiatry by the very man who nearly fifty years ago declared mental illness to be a myth. Stripping away centuries of self-serving propaganda written by psychiatry’s acolytes, Dr. Thomas Szasz gives us a radically new look at the history of the world’s most dangerous political religions. From the eighteenth century’s `trade in lunacy’ to the nineteenth century’s `insane asylums’ to the twentieth century’s `snake pits’ to the twenty-first century’s `outpatient commitment,’ Szasz gives us a radically different perspective on the major episodes in the history of psychiatry. After Coercion as Cure, we will never be able to look at psychiatry again as a legitimate claimant to the throne of medical science.”
Szasz has also done yeoman work in exposing psychiatric quackery. The New York Times reports today that the “number of American children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder increased 40-fold from 1994 to 2003.” This is another Yukon gold rush for the pharmaceutical companies. About half of the children diagnosed with bipolar disorders are dosed with Risperdal – a drug whose side effects can blow the roof off of a garage.
And me with this brand new shiny Amazon.com gift certificate!
I saw that article about the surge of bipolar kids – obviously it is the shrinks that have lost their minds.
Meanwhile, they ignore the fact that there has been a 100-fold increase in manic repression since 9/11. Maybe that should be maniac repression.
Szasz has been excellent on the war on terror. He has seen enough political repression and political lies in his time not to be stampeded by the Bush rigamarole.
The fact that the American Psychological Association has @approved American shrinks participating in torture sessions has not helped the prestige of therapeutic profession…
Mental illness is real. Psychiatrists are putting way too many kids on drugs, but that doesn’t mean mental illness does not exist. I am mentally ill, and I’m saner than I’ve been in decades, in part because of the drugs I take. Mental illness is one of the worst things that can happen to a person.
One of the pillars of this era of the victim…. but another manifestation of labor as a perjorative and way too much luxury and entertainment for our own good…..is this notion that there is a medication and ailment for everyone. If anyone were to gain an accurate accounting of the number of Junior High to College age children who are on Prozac or any of the other behavior- steadying medications pimped by the medical edifice…and then publicize it….. the populace would be both incredulous and alarmed. Then again, they just might shrug it off and that would really be alarming.
There may be some who are helped by and really need medication but current conventional wisdom surpassed this point of use a very long time ago.
I only learned of the extent of the problem when my kids offhandedly informed me of the percentage of their schoolmates on medication…. without naming names. They laughed when I told them it cannot possibly be true, telling me once again how “old fashioned and clueless” I am.
No wonder one of the most popular sayings of the age is “whatever”.
I hate to delve into the musty old closet of “when we were kids..” lore but when we was kids, we didn’t have Prozac to counteract depression or mood swing, we had a little something the old man used to maintain esprit de corps with and it was called: “Rock Pile”. Any whining and one was to repair to the lower 40 near the dog kennel and move the 3 cubic yard pile of rocks from one side of the walk to the other and by the time one was done, attitudes were properly adjusted until the next time the rock pile needed to be moved back to the other side of the walk. We understood Camus before we even heard of him.
Perhaps this malady-fixated former Republic needs a National Rock Pile Week. Just how did we all survive without seat belts, bike helmets, “personal communication devices” and Prozac? How long till Bi-Polarism is the norm?
Some drugs can help some people at some times. But I think psychiatric drug use has become endemic…. esp. among kids.
then again…….since the old Petrolium based Industrial Economy seems to be a tad winded, maybe we have finally found a reliable perpetual motion machine to replace the aging Industrial Revolution:
The Fear Economy.
“e pluribus unum” can simply be replaced by “BOO!”…..in a nice Gothic Script of course.
Maybe a Bremen Bold font would be even more apropos.
Thanks for this news, Jim.
From my perspective, it’s important to clarify that what Szasz said about mental illness wasn’t really that it did not exist. Rather, he discussed it more in the sense of existential discomfort and feeling out of place in the world. He suggested a different focus on how to cure the person who has the symptoms that historically were called “mental illness.”
I agree with Szasz’s views for the most part. However, as someone who has had legitimately devastating bouts of depression, I’m a little hesitant to agree that there is “no such thing as mental illness.” If someone needs to do away with the phrase “mental illness” and replace it with a new term, that’s all well and good, but what does it really tell us?
I guess I’m saying that Szasz’s quarrel seems to be not with the existence of mental illness as a category of infirmity, but rather, he argues against the rather generous interpretation of what constitutes such mental illness.
I undestand Szasz to be critical of medicating people when other avenues of behavior modification might serve a more holistic healthy perspective.
I do not understand him as saying that people do not suffer depression, schizophrenia, paranoia. I see him more as being existential in his approach to mental health.
Am I misreading him?
I think Szasz’s views are more complex than they are often portrayed.
Liberals are always searching for the smoking gun, the miracle cure, the fix to make society perfect. No liberal dares to be average, especially a gun phobic, hoplophobic anti-gun crusader.
Some of them are meat craving chimpanzees.
Government will save all those restless children. No more soul-searching on your own (you need HELP.)
Mental illness is the absence of knowledge or the lowest measures of stupidity. It may also display itself after personal surrender – the enemy (mom or dad or even Big Daddy) having the greatest power. RETREAT ! Save yourself (temporary coward) to fight another day. Parents, lighten-up. If your kid wants to fail then let them. You can’t create an Einstein from an average kid – no matter how much YOU want to succeed.
Liberals want school all year long for all the pups, fillies, colts and babies.
Suicide just might be a wise choice for some – who are we to decide for another. And what kind of person creates fairies, ghosts, UFO’s, Gods, or genius politicians? Someone prone to fantasies, neurosis, psychosis and DRUGS ?. Let em be and let em go – good riddance; better than allowing government to order courts to medicate their enemies (you and me). No ? How many innocents rot on death row ? Worse than that – how many innocents die from the death penalty. They wanta save every beating heart and kill, or incarcerate every one of their enemies.
Even the CIA gave up on most drugs (though not all.) The CIA loves their truth serum (it makes terrorists talk while their sleep). Boo ! And who needed medication, Padilla or his torturers ?
The best antidote is the rhetoric of freedom – sometimes the old, but mostly the new. When you’re surrounded by corruption, lies, cover-ups, bribes, socialists, deficits and nazis, then only the truth about a recent Hangarian election fraud can bring balance to a lopsided, beaten down, wounded brain. And when the euphoria wears off there’s no side effect; you’re left with a harmless reality. Oh my, what would the world be like without libertarians. Who would be there to decipher, and beat back all the madness.
Sean – Based on other articles of his I’ve read, I think you’ve read him right, but I’ll check in after the book gets here and I’ve gotten through it. I think the term “mental illness” has unfortunately been expanded to include “any behavior that disturbs people (self or other) to any degree,” and the rush to medicate it out of existence is doomed to failure and also takes away from the folks who DO need some actual help in coping with serious problems – whether “hardware” or “software” related – in their heads.
Tory,
given the way you have defined “liberal” in the past conversations with me, it sounds like you are complaining about everyone but yourself.
Your criticism looks more like scapegoating than an honest observation of the world you live in. But maybe that’s because you live in a different world from me.
I guess it’s valuable to SOMEone for you to type just for the sake of hearing yourself speak and rail against “the liberals” but I really do not see what your lengthy comment has to do with Tomas Szasz. What have I missed?
…If I’m not mistaken, anyone in the former Soviet Union questioning the authority of the state, or otherwise demonstrating the slightest dissent in regard to living “Workers Paradise” was deemed to be insane and thus involuntarily committed to a variety of Political Prisons throughout the Soviet Union with the ostensible titles of Mental Hospitals, where their “delusions” were treated with various methods; most of them barbaric as the regime that instituted them.
…Rank and file Leftists are unwitting Totalitarians; with the educated and/or intelligent variety looking for a place to rise on the proverbial ant heap. Throughout History the experience of any organized reaction to them has differed little if any. It must operate on the same, collective, hierarchical basis to check its Political expanse.
I am a big time fan of Dr. Szasz and have read about 20 of his books.
What Dr. Szasz means is that “mental illness” is not a disease as per Virchowian definition that is used by pathologists.
People with “problems in living” is what Dr. Szasz says the so-called mentally ill are.
Depression for instance.
The cure for depression is hope.
Offering hope is a spiritual matter and not a medical matter.
Psychiatrists are soul doctors who use pseudo-medical sounding language to associate themselves with medicine.
Language and the power of the metaphor is the tool of the soul doctors.
Broken hearts are not the same as a heart attack.
Feeling don’t belong in the realm of medicine.
Bottom line….. There is no Physical Health Act that gives authority to Pathology books.
Mental Health Acts from one end of the Nation to the other are what make the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual V4 legitimacy.
Members of the APA vote on what gets into that book as a disease by the way.
What was it Jefferson said about only error needing legislation because truth can stand on its own?
People put up with it because the Act empowers the police to deal with people who disturb us but aren’t committing any crimes.
I came to libertarianism through the writings of Thomas Szasz.
Dr. Szasz is also a political philosopher second to none in the Licertarian sphere.
I found Szasz an easier read than Mises and Rothbard too!
With respect to Szasz, there is no mental illness or mental health – they are code words for disapproved (undesirable) and approved (desirable) behavior, consequently, there can be no “cure” for undesirable behaviors like depression or schizophrenia. People troubled by their own behavior will more than likely seek some sort of help – autonomous psychotherapy – would help a person to change his (or her) behavior in the way they would like. Changing one’s behavior takes courage rather than insight.
Those whose behavior troubles others will likely be forced into “treatment” which Szasz desribes as assault. Those people are placed in a prison called euphemistcially a hospital.
there isn’t any anti psychiatry that is truthful isn’t it, because to do anti psychiatry is almost pretty much like doing psychiatry trying to change someones mind, I suppose it is different to, I am a faithful anti pyschiatry kind of a person who would love to meet some others who really want to put a stop to psychiatry and not just play games about doing it, thanks for being around
Please have someone contact me, it is very inportant and this issue should be addressed with the proper health and rights advocate. Thanks for all your help and concern. sincerely Anita in Florida.
Life is difficult once we truly understand and accept it -then life is no longer difficult
Life is a series of problems.Do we want to moan about them or solve them?Do we want to teach our children to solve them?we all know the effects of a teacher who tell as we’re useless.If we are put down regularly and at key times or key individuals we can get stuck there,with chronic and deep difficulties with how we feel about ourselves,what we need is support to develop self confidence and sense of security.However we need courages people like you to gives us the tools for the future.Thank you for being Thomas Szasz
SASA
It has taken me some time to discover the amazing Thomas Szasz and I cannot wait to read everything he has written. I have always believed that this psychiatry stuff was nonsense and that most people who suffer from distress are reacting to an often cruel and heartless environment. When the majority of adults have no idea of what a child is then it is inevitable that each generation will manifest weirder and weirder behaviours as can be seen in the USA and other so-called democrtic communities. It is a sick joke played on the most vulnerable of people more often than not.
Keith Hoeller said: ” …by the very man who nearly fifty years ago declared mental illness to be a myth. ” Actually it’s the other way around. Szasz unmasked the declaration that undesirable behaviors (renamed as depression, schizophrenia, etc.) are mental illnesses. Mental illness is a metaphor in that it looks like an illness (like heart disease or cancer) but isn’t and is in the same catagory as spring fever or cabin fever or homesickness.
I became aware of Szasz in an unusual way, through a book by Kay Redfield Jamison. Her positions are identical to those of the APA. In her book “Understanding Suicide,” She gives two pages of a 400 page book to Szasz, who represents the opposition. Her two pages are downright slanderous.
I’m surely not an expert on Psychology, but I grew up in the inner city which makes me somewhat of an expert on what we call “game,” more commonly known as bullshit. When a person feels secure in their position/argument, they usually don’t feel it necessary to verbally assault the author of an opposing opinion. On this point alone, I found Szasz to be more credible than Jamison and the so-called anti psychiatrists to be more credible than the psychiatrists who represent the APA Establishment.
Dirk, mental illness is not a real disease but simply an invented term to describe either unwanted behavior or dissident thought as the case may be.
If you a real organic brain disease like alzheimer’s or mental retardation that is an organic physical disease treated by neurologists, not by talking or involuntary confinement or electroshock or forced medication with brain disabling drugs. Mind doesn’t exist, it’s simply a term for conversation with self and others. You have problems in living like everywhere else but what you don’t have is a mental disease. You really need to read Szasz’s work before commenting on it.