All Posts Tagged With: "psychiatry"
House of Aces
Almost 50 years have passed since I first proposed that the concept of mental illness and the profession of psychiatry rest on fictitious foundations. “Mental illnesses” (henceforth without scare quotes) are behaviors, not diseases. Psychiatry is religion, rhetoric, and repression, not medicine. The basis for understanding mental illness lies in semiotics (the study of signs [...]
1Jul2004 | Thomas Szasz | 0 comments | ContinuedBook Reviews – April 2004
America the Virtuous: The Crisis of Democracy and the Quest for Empire by Claes G. Ryn Transaction Publishers • 2003 • 221 pages • $34.95 Reviewed by Richard Ebeling In 1988 Robert Nisbet, one of America’s most prominent sociologists and conservative social philosophers, published The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America. He critically [...]
1Apr2004 | FEE Admin | 0 comments | ContinuedSelf-Ownership or Suicide Prevention?
The core libertarian principle of self-ownership implies that we have a right to commit suicide: the state has no right to forcibly prevent us from killing ourselves. The core psychiatric practice of suicide prevention implies that we have no right to kill ourselves: the state — through its mental health laws and psychiatric agents — [...]
1Mar2004 | Thomas Szasz | 1 comment | ContinuedCivil Liberties and Civil Commitment
Defenders of civil liberties readily recognize when some state interventions—such as censorship of the press or forced religious observances—violate civil liberties. However, many of the same defenders of civil liberties are unable or refuse to recognize when certain other state interventions—such as civil commitment—violate civil liberties.
1Dec2003 | Thomas Szasz | 8 comments | ContinuedTaking Drug Laws Seriously, II
Libertarians univocally assert that the prohibition against initiating violence is a cardinal principle of libertarianism. The peasant in Colombia who grows coca is not initiating violence. The politician in the District of Columbia who enacts laws authorizing the use of military aircraft to bomb and destroy the peasant’s crop does.
1Oct2003 | Thomas Szasz | 2 comments | ContinuedBook Reviews – May 2003
The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power by Max Boot Basic Books • 2002 • 448 pages • $30.00 hardcover; $16.00 paperback Reviewed by Ivan Eland Max Boot provides a thorough and relatively candid history of the U.S. government’s involvement in small wars. The section of the book on [...]
1May2003 | FEE Admin | 0 comments | ContinuedParity or Prevarication?
In my March 2002 column I showed that the advocates of parity for mental illness are engaged in a campaign of calculated falsehoods. Their claim that mental diseases are brain diseases is a lie. The last thing the mental-health zealots want is parity in the legal treatment of mental patients and medical patients. Despite being [...]
1Mar2003 | Thomas Szasz | 0 comments | ContinuedStraight Talk about Suicide
Suicide–like accident, illness, death, poverty, persecution, and war–has always been with us and has always been regarded as a part of life. Believing that a person’s life belongs to God, not himself, the Jews declared it to be a grievous sin, and Christians and Muslims followed suit. Enlightenment thought did not overtly repudiate this view. [...]
1Sep2002 | Thomas Szasz | 0 comments | ContinuedPharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America
This review was commissioned over a year ago. I was looking forward to writing it. But then the depression began. Stress. A new job. A major move. A new marriage. I felt unfocused, obviously not in a condition to write a review of an important new book. Many psychiatrists would have no problem diagnosing my [...]
1Aug2002 | Ross Levatter | 0 comments | ContinuedInsanity and Intolerance
In the Age of Faith, the Church, viewed as having been established by Christ, was perceived as a perfect society. Hence, it was reasonable that it be empowered to make laws and inflict penalties for their violation, which were viewed as striking at her very life, the unity of belief. The result was the concept [...]
1Jul2002 | Thomas Szasz | 1 comment | ContinuedParity for Mental Illness, Disparity for Mental Patients
By definition, diseases are afflictions of the body. Hence, afflictions of the mind, called “mental illnesses,” are not real diseases. Organized psychiatry deals with that embarrassing fact by reasserting its age-old claim that “mental illnesses” are brain diseases and enlisting the power of the state to turn fiction into fact. In October 2001 the Senate [...]
1Mar2002 | Thomas Szasz | 1 comment | ContinuedPatient or Prisoner?
Today, the names of madhouses no longer contain terms such as “insanity,” “madness, “mental hospital,” or even “hospital.” They are “centers”—named after a locality or person, the latter typically honoring the memory of a former madhouse keeper. Thus do psychiatrists destigmatize mental institutions, legitimize themselves as physicians, and even more easily restigmatize mental patients as dangerous quasi-criminals.
1Jan2002 | Thomas Szasz | 0 comments | ContinuedMental Illness: Psychiatry’s Phlogiston
“The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” —Gilbert K. Chesterton In physics the same laws are used to explain why airplanes fly and why they crash. In medicine the same principles are used to explain why people live and [...]
1Nov2001 | Thomas Szasz | 0 comments | ContinuedPsychiatry in a Communist Utopia
Miguel Faria, Jr., M.D., is editor-in-chief of the Medical Sentinel, published by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, and author of Medical Warrior: Fighting Corporate Socialized Medicine. I recently read a book that should shock freedom-loving and civil-liberty-loving readers, even the libertarians, Objectivists, and Americans of other political persuasions who (thanks to Dr. Thomas [...]
1Nov2000 | Miguel A. Faria Jr. | 2 comments | ContinuedRemembering Masturbatory Insanity
“Every age has its peculiar folly; some scheme, project, or phantasy into which it plunges, spurred on either by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the mere force of imitation.” —Charles Mackay Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds The contemporary mental health movement—epitomized by the dogmatic belief that “mental illness [...]
1May2000 | Thomas Szasz | 6 comments | ContinuedDoes Insanity Cause Crime?
“The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” —Gilbert K. Chesterton For 300 years we have sidestepped confronting the truth about human desperation and depravity, and the horrors the desperate and the depraved can inflict on us and themselves. In [...]
1Mar2000 | Thomas Szasz | 1 comment | ContinuedRemembering Krafft-Ebing
In my previous column (November 1999), I showed that mental illness is not a disease because it does not meet the scientific criterion of disease. In this column I will show that the primary purpose of psychiatry is not medical-therapeutic because its historical mandate and primary purpose is not to remedy a patient’s diseases but [...]
1Jan2000 | Thomas Szasz | 0 comments | Continued-
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