All Posts Tagged With: "mental illness"
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 | ContinuedSenseless
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 | ContinuedThe 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 | ContinuedAsk Not For Whom the Drug Tolls
“Fifty years ago, it made sense to assert that mental illnesses are not diseases, but it makes no sense to say so today. Debate about what counts as mental illness has been replaced by legislation about the medicalization and demedicalization of behavior. Old diseases such as homosexuality and hysteria disappear. New diseases such as gambling [...]
22Dec2010 | Wendy McElroy | 13 comments | ContinuedThe 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 | ContinuedAntipsychiatry: Quackery Squared
In this latest work, Freeman columnist Thomas Szasz fires another salvo in his continuing critique of the disasters wrought by contemporary psychiatry—specifically its penchant for coercive pseudomedical interventions that masquerade as treatment while depriving people of their liberty. Here, however, the focus is more specific, with Szasz providing the definitive critique of what has erroneously [...]
22Sep2010 | Ron Roberts | 4 comments | ContinuedFaith in Freedom: Libertarian Principles and Psychiatric Practices
Thomas Szasz, a Freeman columnist and a long-time libertarian hero, thinks that many other libertarian luminaries are slacking on the job. Szasz has fought his intellectual and legal battles for individual liberty—always paired with responsibility—in a particularly contentious arena: the struggle over rights for the so-called mentally ill. Szasz wonders why so many other prominent [...]
13Jul2010 | Brian Doherty | 1 comment | ContinuedThe 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 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 | ContinuedMendacity 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 | ContinuedBook Reviews – October 2008
Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism by Jörg Guido Hülsmann Ludwig von Mises Institute • 2007 • 1143 pages • $50.00 Reviewed by Bettina Bien Greaves Biographer Guido Hülsmann has written a magnificent book, describing in detail not only the life of Ludwig von Mises, but also his writings, his intellectual development, and his importance. [...]
1Oct2008 | George C. Leef | 1 comment | ContinuedPsychiatry Versus Liberty
For millennia, slavery—involuntary servitude—was a universally accepted social institution. Today, psychiatric slavery—involuntary “treatment for mental illness”—is such an institution. Psychiatric incarceration and forced psychiatric treatment are integral parts of modern medical practice and social life. The libertarian philosophy of freedom is based on the premise that self-ownership is a basic right and that initiating violence [...]
1Jul2008 | Thomas Szasz | 2 comments | ContinuedAnti-Coercion Is Not Anti-Psychiatry
The term “anti-psychiatry” was created in 1967 by the South African psychiatrist David Cooper (1931–1986) and the Scottish psychiatrist Ronald David Laing (1927–1989). Instead of defining the term, they identified it as follows: “We have had many pipe-dreams about the ideal psychiatric, or rather anti-psychiatric, community.” The “we” were Cooper, Laing, Joseph Berke, and Leon [...]
1May2008 | Thomas Szasz | 3 comments | ContinuedTreatments Without Diseases
In the psychiatrically correct view, mental illnesses are “just like bodily illnesses”; in fact, they are authoritatively declared to be “brain diseases.” The truth is that they are not. In medicine, there are diseases and, sometimes, treatments for them. In psychiatry, there are no diseases; nevertheless there are always treatments; that is, procedures declared to [...]
1Mar2008 | Thomas Szasz | 1 comment | ContinuedMental Illness: Sickness or Status?
Popular belief and scientific dogma notwithstanding, the term “mental illness” refers to unwanted behavior, not medical malady. Specifically, the term refers to the role of “mental patient,” a social status imbued with far-reaching legal and political implications. The law assumes that persons called “mental patients” are more likely to be dangerous to themselves and/or others [...]
1Aug2006 | Thomas Szasz | 0 comments | ContinuedMental Illness as Brain Disease: A Brief History Lesson
A 1999 White House Conference on Mental Health concluded: “Research in the last decade proves that mental illnesses are diagnosable disorders of the brain.” President William Clinton was more specific: “Mental illness can be accurately diagnosed, successfully treated, just as physical illness.” Persons who reject the view that mental illnesses are physical diseases are dismissed [...]
1May2006 | Thomas Szasz | 1 comment | ContinuedPsychiatry: Disease Inflation
In his classic, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1920), John Maynard Keynes observed: “Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it [...]
1Mar2006 | Thomas Szasz | 0 comments | Continued-
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