The advent of private psychotherapy, at the end of the nineteenth century, split psychiatry in two: some patients continued to be the involuntary inmates of state hospitals; others became the voluntary patients of privately practicing psychotherapists. Psychotherapy was officially defined as a type [...]
Every age, labels others to a particular fate, such as the witch consigned to the fire. The priest has now been replaced by the psychiatrist and this text examines the role of medicine as a more insidious tyrant than religion, as it claims to be beneficial to both the patient and the commonwealth.[...]
For more than half a century Thomas Szasz has devoted much of his career to a radical critique of psychiatry. His latest work, "Psychiatry: The Science of Lies", is a culmination of his life's work: to portray the integral role of deception in the history and practice of psychiatry.Szasz argues that[...]
More than fifty years ago, Thomas Szasz showed that the concept of mental illness - a disease of the mind - is an oxymoron, a metaphor, a myth. Disease, in the medical sense, affects only the body. He also demonstrated that civil commitment and the insanity defense, the paradigmatic practices of psy[...]
Thomas Szasz's classic book revolutionised thinking throughout the world about the nature of the psychiatric profession and the moral implications of its practices. By diagnosing behaviour problems as 'mental illness', psychiatry, Szasz argues, absolves the individual of responsibility for his actio[...]
For St Augustine, sexual desire was a disease; to the great doctors of coitus today, lack of sexual desire is a disease. For Dr Szasz, both these presumptions are absurd and unscientific. He argues persuasively that human sexuality - however it may be expressed - reveals and reflects who we are and [...]
This is a defence of every individual's right to choose a voluntary death. By maintaining statutes that determine that voluntary death is not legal, Thomas Szasz believes that our society is forfeiting one of its basic freedoms and causing the psychiatric medical establishment to treat individuals i[...]
Understanding the history of psychiatry requires an accurate view of its function and purpose. In this provocative new study of this nominal medical specialty,Szasz challenges conventional beliefs about psychiatry. He asserts that, in fact,psychiatrists are not concerned with the diagnosis and treat[...]
As it entered the 1960s, American institutional psychiatry was thriving, with a high percentage of medical students choosing the field. But after Thomas S. Szasz published his masterwork in 1961, The Myth of Mental Illness, the psychiatric world was thrown into chaos. Szasz enlightened the world abo[...]