Archive for Thomas Szasz

Thomas Szasz is professor of psychiatry emeritus at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. His latest book, Suicide Prohibition: The Shame of Medicine, will be published in October by Syracuse University Press.

Imprisoning Innocents

We often engage in behaviors that endanger ourselves and are protected from such actions by warnings—instinctual or those issued by parents, priests, politicians, and physicians. The penalty for ignoring most warnings is the consequence of our actions. In only a few exceptions—“suicidal ideation” or “threat” being one—are we punished for such actions by agents of [...]

30Nov2011 | Thomas Szasz | 5 comments | Continued

Titles of Ignobility: Suicide as Secession

According to the World Health Organization, the United States stands 39th on the list of countries ranked by suicide rate. Despite this, nowhere else in the world is suicide so passionately medicalized and prohibited as in the United States. Why do people kill themselves? Because they are mentally ill, assert the mental health experts, a [...]

21Sep2011 | Thomas Szasz | 43 comments | Continued

The Shame of Medicine: Is Suicide Legal?

What do we mean when we say an act is legal? We mean that we are free to think and speak about it, and plan and perform it, without penalty by agents of the State. Legal acts—for example, cooking and walking—are matters of indifference to the law. Suicide is not. Accordingly, suicide is illegal or [...]

22Jun2011 | Thomas Szasz | 10 comments | Continued

Senseless

Do people really want to know why, on January 8, 2011, in Tucson, Arizona, a young man named Jared Lee Loughner engaged in mass murder? I submit they do not. Politicians, psychiatrists, pundits, and the press univocally assert that Loughner’s deed is the “senseless” product of mental illness. This belief in a nonexistent mental disease [...]

21Apr2011 | Thomas Szasz | 20 comments | Continued

The Shame of Medicine: Celebrating Coercion

“Coercion is a subjective response to a particular intervention and has been considered an unfortunate but necessary part of the care of people with psychiatric illness.” That definition of the State-sanctioned forcible control of innocent persons labeled mentally ill by persons labeled psychiatrists was offered by Giles Newton-Howes—honorary senior lecturer in the department of psychological medicine, [...]

24Feb2011 | Thomas Szasz | 7 comments | Continued

Senseless

Politicians, psychiatrists, pundits, and the press univocally assert that Jared Loughner’s mass murder was the product of mental illness. Was it?

20Jan2011 | Thomas Szasz | 26 comments | Continued

The Illegitimacy of the “Psychiatric Bible”

“Mental health experts ask: Will anyone be normal?” So read the title of a July 27 Reuters report. The “experts” warned that the fifth version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), scheduled for publication in 2013, “could mean that soon no-one will be classed as normal. . . . [M]any people [...]

24Nov2010 | Thomas Szasz | 23 comments | Continued

The Medicalization of Suicide

Everyone now knows that suicide is a medical problem. Not long ago everyone knew that it was a religious and criminal problem. Bereft of the power of critical thinking and lacking historical knowledge, the human mind is a sponge for absorbing and magnifying error. The great American humorist Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw, 1818–1885) said [...]

22Sep2010 | Thomas Szasz | 3 comments | Continued

The Art and Science of Pseudology

The common belief that the scientist’s job is to reveal the secrets of nature is erroneous. Nature has no secrets; only persons do. Secrecy implies agency, which is absent in nature. This is the main reason the so-called “behavioral sciences” are not merely unlike the physical sciences but are in many ways their opposites. “Nature,” [...]

29Jun2010 | Thomas Szasz | 8 comments | Continued

The Shame of Medicine: Acquittal by Psychiatry

When a pathologist gives expert testimony in a murder case, he may be able to say why the victim died. The pathologist-physician would not be expected to express an opinion about the defendant’s guilt or innocence; were he to express an opinion about it, it would not be attributed to his medical expertise. When a [...]

19Apr2010 | Thomas Szasz | 2 comments | Continued

The Shame of Medicine: Alan Turing Redux

In my May 2009 column I recounted the tragic story of the medical-legal persecution of the famed British mathematician and World War II code breaker Alan Turing. In June, John Graham-Cumming, a British computer programmer, created a petition on the “No. 10 Downing Street” website asking for a government apology for Turing’s mistreatment. On September [...]

24Feb2010 | Thomas Szasz | 1 comment | Continued

The Shame of Medicine: Conviction by Psychiatry

In the predawn hours of June 5, 2002, Brian David Mitchell entered the bedroom of 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart and her nine-year-old sister Mary Katherine and left the house with Elizabeth. They walked to a camp site four miles behind her wealthy parents’ spacious Salt Lake City home where they joined Wanda Barzee, Mitchell’s wife. Nine [...]

18Nov2009 | Thomas Szasz | 5 comments | Continued

The Shame of Medicine: The Case of General Edwin Walker

In 1962 James Meredith, an African-American student, tried to enroll at the University of Mississippi. His admission was opposed by Ross Barnett, the Democratic governor of the state, former Major General Edwin A. Walker (1909–1993), a decorated hero of World War II and prominent “right-winger,” and a group of segregationist white students. To ensure Meredith’s [...]

23Sep2009 | Thomas Szasz | 8 comments | Continued

The Shame of Medicine: The Depravity of Psychiatry

Psychiatrists alternately deny and delight in possessing special professional skill at detecting future “dangerousness” that entitles them to the special power to incarcerate individuals they so stigmatize in prisons that masquerade as hospitals. The American legal system makes heavy use of psychiatric determinations of dangerousness, as a result of which vast numbers of Americans are deprived of liberty and, at the same time, of opportunity to demonstrate the injustice of their detention. Examples abound.

17Jun2009 | Thomas Szasz | 12 comments | Continued

The Shame of Medicine: The Case of Alan Turing

The posthumous diagnosis of suicide as mental illness is the ritual degradation ceremony of our therapeutic age, much as the posthumous burning of the heretic’s corpse was the ritual degradation ceremony of an earlier theological age.

24Apr2009 | Thomas Szasz | 17 comments | Continued
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The Burden of Responsibility

Life is an unending series of choices and, therefore, “problems in living.” Ordinary choices—what to have for breakfast—we ignore as trivial. Extraordinary choices—whether to kill ourselves (or worse)—we dismiss as the symptoms of mental illness. The profession of psychiatry rests on, and caters to, the ubiquitous human desire to avoid, evade, and deny the very [...]

1Dec2008 | Thomas Szasz | 2 comments | Continued

Mendacity by Metaphor

Once upon a time, law-abiding citizens acknowledged that they wanted lawbreakers punished. They did not say the offenders “needed” punishment. When they used the term “need” metaphorically—as when an outlaw in a bar told his buddies that one of their adversaries “needed” killing—they knew what they were talking about. They did not lie to themselves, [...]

1Oct2008 | Thomas Szasz | 1 comment | Continued
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