Mental illness is a
myth, whose function is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter
pill of moral conflicts in human relations. - Thomas
Szasz
[PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.azquotes.com/quote/952116]
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Mental illness is a myth, whose function is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations.
Thomas Stephen Szasz (/ˈsɑːs/ SAHSS; Hungarian: Szász
Tamás István; 15 April 1920, Budapest,
Hungary – 8 September 2012, Manlius,
New York, U.S.) was an American academic, psychiatrist
and psychoanalyst. He served for most of his career as
professor of psychiatry at the State
University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York. A distinguished lifetime
fellow of the American Psychiatric Association
and a life member of the American Psychoanalytic Association,
he was best known as a social critic of the moral and scientific foundations of
psychiatry,
as what he saw as the social control aims of medicine in
modern society, as well as scientism. His books The Myth of Mental Illness (1961)
and The Manufacture of Madness (1970) set out some of the arguments most
associated with him.
Szasz argued throughout
his career that mental illness is a metaphor for
human problems in living, and that mental illnesses are not real in the sense
that cancers are real. Except for a few identifiable brain diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, there are “neither
biological or chemical tests nor biopsy or necropsy findings for verifying or falsifying
DSM
diagnoses", i.e., there are no objective methods for detecting the
presence or absence of mental illness. Szasz maintained throughout his career
that he was not anti-psychiatry but was rather anti-coercive
psychiatry. He was a staunch opponent of civil
commitment and involuntary psychiatric treatment but believed in, and
practiced, psychiatry and psychotherapy between consenting
adults.
His views on special
treatment followed from libertarian roots, based on the principles
that each person has the right to bodily
and mental self-ownership and the right to be free from violence from
others, although he criticized the "Free World"
as well as the communist states for their use of psychiatry.
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