Thomas Szasz
Thomas Szasz
Thomas Stephen Szasz) 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...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPsychologist
Date of Birth15 April 1920
CountryUnited States of America
The disease concept of homosexuality as with the disease concept of all so-called mental illnesses, such as alcoholism, drug addiction, or suicide conceals the fact that homosexuals are a group of medically stigmatized and socially persecuted individuals. ... Their anguished cries of protest are drowned out by the rhetoric of therapy just as the rhetoric of salvation drowned out the [cries] of heretics.
Addiction, obesity, starvation (anorexia nervosa) are political problems, not psychiatric: each condense and expresses a contest between the individual and some other person or persons in his environment over the control of the individual's body.
All drugs of any interest to any moderately intelligent person in America are now illegal.
If, nevertheless, textbooks of pharmacology legitimately contain a chapter on drug abuse and drug addiction, then, by the same token, textbooks of gynecology and urology should contain a chapter on prostitution; textbooks of physiology, a chapter on perversion; textbooks of genetics, a chapter on the racial inferiority of Jews and Negroes.
Some people say they haven't yet found themselves. But the self is not something one finds; it is something one creates.
Suicide is a fundamental human right. This does not mean that it is morally desirable. It only means that society does not have the moral right to interfere
Whenever masses of people, especially educated people, know something- and when what they know is something they greatly fear because they believe it affects virtually everything they do or want to do - then most likely we stand in the presence of a
Although we may not know it, we have, in our day, witnessed the birth of the Therapeutic State. This is perhaps the major implication of psychiatry as an institution of social control.
Knowledge is gained by learning; trust by doubt; skill by practice; love by love.
Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly often attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.
It taught me, at an early age, that being wrong can be dangerous, but being right, when society regards the majority’s falsehood as truth, could be fatal.
Classifying thoughts, feelings and behaviors as diseases is a logical and semantic error, like classifying whale as fish.
Mental illness, of course, is not literally a 'thing' - or physical object - and hence it can 'exist' only in the same sort of way in which other theoretical concepts exist.
I submit that the traditional definition of psychiatry, which is still vogue, places it alongside such things as alchemy and astrology, and commits it to the category of pseudo-science.