{"id":339,"date":"2007-09-04T15:14:00","date_gmt":"2007-09-04T20:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2007\/09\/04\/thomas-szasz-has-a-new-masterpiece-coercion-as-cure\/"},"modified":"2007-09-04T15:14:00","modified_gmt":"2007-09-04T20:14:00","slug":"thomas-szasz-has-a-new-masterpiece-coercion-as-cure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2007\/09\/04\/thomas-szasz-has-a-new-masterpiece-coercion-as-cure\/","title":{"rendered":"Thomas Szasz has a New Masterpiece: COERCION AS CURE"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thomas Szasz, whose 1961 book The Myth of Mental Illness<\/em><\/strong> revolutionized thinking about involuntary commitment, has a new book out:\u00a0 Coercion As Cure: A Critical History of Psychiatry<\/a><\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Szasz helps people recognize how\u00a0many issues\u00a0portrayed solely as questions of mental health are actually questions of liberty.\u00a0\u00a0 He has\u00a0helped 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

George J. Annas of\u00a0 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.'”<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

Szasz has also done yeoman work in exposing psychiatric quackery.\u00a0 The New York Times reports today<\/strong> <\/a>that the “number of American children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder increased 40-fold from 1994 to 2003.”\u00a0 This is another Yukon gold rush for the pharmaceutical companies.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thomas Szasz, whose 1961 book The Myth of Mental Illness revolutionized thinking about involuntary commitment, has a new book out:\u00a0 Coercion As Cure: A Critical History of Psychiatry. Szasz helps people recognize how\u00a0many issues\u00a0portrayed solely as questions of mental health are actually questions of liberty.\u00a0\u00a0 He has\u00a0helped open the eyes of generations of Americans to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[6],"class_list":["post-339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-bovard"],"yoast_head":"\nThomas Szasz has a New Masterpiece: COERCION AS CURE - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2007\/09\/04\/thomas-szasz-has-a-new-masterpiece-coercion-as-cure\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Thomas Szasz has a New Masterpiece: COERCION AS CURE - James Bovard\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Thomas Szasz, whose 1961 book The Myth of Mental Illness revolutionized thinking about involuntary commitment, has a new book out:\u00a0 Coercion As Cure: A Critical History of Psychiatry. 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