In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined. – Thomas Szasz
Strictly speaking, assisted suicide is an oxymoron. –Thomas Szasz
From the NY Times:
Thomas Szasz, a psychiatrist whose 1961 book “The Myth of Mental Illness” questioned the legitimacy of his field and provided the intellectual grounding for generations of critics, patient advocates and antipsychiatry activists, making enemies of many fellow doctors, died Saturday at his home in Manlius, N.Y. He was 92.
He died after a fall, his daughter Dr. Margot Szasz Peters said.
Dr. Szasz (pronounced sahz) published his critique at a particularly vulnerable moment for psychiatry. With Freudian theorizing just beginning to fall out of favor, the field was trying to become more medically oriented and empirically based. Fresh from Freudian training himself, Dr. Szasz saw psychiatry’s medical foundation as shaky at best, and his book hammered away, placing the discipline “in the company of alchemy and astrology.”
Dr. Szasz argued against coercive treatments, like involuntary confinement, and the use of psychiatric diagnoses in the courts, calling both practices unscientific and unethical. He was soon placed in the company of other prominent critics of psychiatry, including the Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman and the French philosopher Michel Foucault.
Edward Shorter, the author of “A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac” (1997), called Dr. Szasz “the biggest of the antipsychiatry intellectuals.”
You can read the rest of the long – but hardly comprehensive – obituary here. If you want to find more about Szasz and his work, I recommend checking out the Thomas S. Szasz Cybercenter for Liberty and Responsibility.
Anyone who is interested in various perspectives and arguments against legalized assisted suicide should check out some of his writing on the topic. You are guaranteed to strongly disagree with some of what he wrote over the years. Other material will give you food for thought – and some different ways of thinking about the issues, especially when talking to libertarians.
You can read excerpts from two essays Szasz wrote dealing with assisted suicide, along with active links to the entire essays by clicking here.
Dr. Szasz was a great and courageous man. A towering figure in his time. His writing on many topics was marvelous, and all would be well-served to read some of his books.
I wish there were more like Dr. Thomas Szasz. At least we still have Mind freedom and Scientology. I just spent 59 days being hospitalized against my will and made to take medication that almost killed me in the past based on the word of my parents who I do not get along with. It was an interesting experience. There were people released in two to three weeks that actually did self harm just because they agreed to take medication. I did no self harm nor did I threaten it and was held simply because I did not agree. In fact, I had to leave the state of Kentucky. Psychiatric medications kill. It seems unbelievable to me that under the guise of caring about someone that might do self-harm people are being made to take medications that are proven to cause harm to them. Well, at least psychiatrists can make 100s of thousands a year while 100s of thousands of the rest of the population are severely maimed by psychiatry’s medications. That’s some serious sarcasm. Did anyone ever consider that some of these people who are labeled as mentally ill are actually sick with other illnesses that are left untreated? The current medical profession prefers it that way because they make money from patients that keep returning and are never cured. Good luck Obamacare.
Stephen,
I finally got here – between my ME and spouse’s sudden medical scare, I’ve had a hectic couple of weeks plus.
(I wish I had the tech skills to put some color in here—I am too ill to do facebook, so I shall comment here after looking at the photos.)
Congratulations!!! My very very best wishes to you and Diane. My eyes are wet. The photos are wonderful.
My spouse and I were “partners”, a couple (too old to be called “boyfriend and girlfriend) for almost 14 years when we wed in June, 1993. It came out of my being inhospital for escalation of ME/CFS and deciding I wanted to marry Ralph. (2nd marriages for each of us.)
I shall read more about the good doctor Szasz who I had heard of. I have my own issues with psychiatry based on being inhospital with ME/CFS as a result of the severe insomnia of the illness and asking to be taken to hospital. The oncall neurologist (hospital too small to have one on premises all the time) told me on the phone that he “wouldn’t come in (on a Saturday) for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome”. The medical ER could not admit me without a doctor and my internist since 1975 was out of town. The medical staff knew I needed admittance so they went to psychiatric ER and asked would they admit me. So, I spent two weeks on the “locked floor” of a community hospital – not transferred to medical floor. It was discovered that I had a severe eye infection and they saved the vision in that eye (although I have a scar on my cornea making vision in one eye like seeing thru a glass speared with Vaseline). I was told by the resident shrink that “you must be peculiar because you are an artist and artists are peculiar”. It was an education: no wheelchair access on the psychiatric floor, so I had to crawl to the toilet from the doorway…. and I became “educated” in how psychiatric patients are treated in short term stays. (Longer hospitalization patients were transferred to psychiatric institutions.) I was in collapse at start but able to sit in my wheelchair some in 2nd week and did a bit of organizing of patients and some educating of staff (such as nurse about allergy/asthma who insisted no one could have a reaction to vitamins when I refused them). It takes a longer essay and I did two special reports for the Disabled Artists’ Network when I got out, as could.
I insisted a nurse say what floor she saw me on in the hospital,not to keep it a secret when telling her apartment building neighbor “hello” from me. The nurse had a neighbor who was someone I’d worked with years before; we both lived in the same neighborhood as the hospital for decades.
That was 1993, and stigma was rampant then and now about psychiatric “patients”. I have friends and art colleagues who have mental illness. One very close friend recently died. He had had adult onset manic depression (before the name change of the illness to bi-polar and he never changed his terminology, so I won’t). He died in a “lock-up” for old people with mental illness where he’d been over ten years. He had been living independently with treatment in his own apartment for decades with the illness, when he was talked into participating in a drug trial for a drug used for schizophrenia. He was able to contact me from the hospital during the drug experiment that he was getting worse and wanted “out” of the experiment, but couldn’t get out. I contacted the hospital ombudsman, who got his permission to talk with me, and she got him out of the experiment after 8 weeks. He never returned to his regular “plateau” state and privatization (as well as the death of his lovely psychiatrist who’d died and her replacement is who talked my friend into the experiment)resulted in this society failing my friend. My partner and I had our friend as a witness at our wedding because he was such a lovely human being.
So, I have my own thoughts, observations and feelings about psychiatry. (Not all bad; I was trained in medical biofeedback by a pioneer in the field who was a psychiatrist.)
Dr. Szasz’s view of psychiatry were “not all bad,” either. He had no gripe with psychiatry that doesn’t involve coercion, but he recognized that beast to be as rare as the unicorn.
In my opinion psychiatry circumvents the actual criminal justice system in too many ways. In effect, what psychiatry has done is make it too easy to victimize the person diagnosed with a mental illness. Psychiatry is largely about creating power for the psychiatrist and his/her croonies. The answer of criminal justice is basically the same when it comes to the person labeled as mentally ill. “Oh, that guy is crazy. What he or she says makes no since”, when it often does. It makes an easy victim for whoever the criminal may be, whether it be a person that is part of a mental health or criminal justice system or a more commonly held notion of a criminal. America is the same lame as ever. It finds ways of blaming the same types of people and rarely holding the most guilty accountable.