On the Heels of Ignorance by Owen Whooley

Sex by Prescription: The Startling Truth about Today’s Sex Therapy Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America

Pain and Pleasure: A Study of Bodily Feelings Our Right to Drugs: The Case for a Free Market The Medicalization of Everyday Life: Selected Essays The Meaning of Mind: Language, Morality, and Neuroscience The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry: An Inquiry into the Social Uses of Mental Health Practices Ideology and Insanity: Essays on the Psychiatric Dehumanization of Man Other books by Thomas Szasz available from Syracuse University PressĪnti-Freud: Karl Kraus’s Criticism of Psychoanalysis and PsychiatryĬeremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts, and Pushers, revised editionĬruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society’s Unwantedįatal Freedom: The Ethics and Politics of Suicide They stem from conceptual analysis, social-political criticism, and common sense. In Antipsychiatry: Quackery Squared, Szasz powerfully argues that his writings belong to neither psychiatry nor antipsychiatry.

Subsuming his work under the rubric of antipsychiatry betrays and negates it just as surely and effectively as subsuming it under the rubric of psychiatry. Laing, the antipsychiatrists used the term to attract attention to themselves and to deflect attention from what they did, which included coercions and excuses based on psychiatric principles and power.įor this reason, Szasz rejected, and continues to reject, psychiatry and antipsychiatry with equal vigor. In the late 1960s, the launching of the so-called antipsychiatry movement vitiated Szasz’s effort to present a precisely formulated conceptual and political critique of the medical identity of psychiatry. The psychiatric establishment’s rejection of Szasz’s critique posed no danger to his work: its defense of coercions and excuses as 'therapy' supported his argument regarding the metaphorical nature of mental illness and the transparent immorality of brutal psychiatric control masquerading as humane medical care. He also demonstrated that civil commitment and the insanity defense, the paradigmatic practices of psychiatry, are incompatible with the political values of personal responsibility and individual liberty. Disease, in the medical sense, affects only the body. 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.

On the Heels of Ignorance by Owen Whooley