Ideology and Insanity: Essays on the Psychiatric Dehumanization of Man

by Thomas Szasz

This volume contains the earliest essays, going back more than 30 years, in which the author staked out his position on 'the nature, scope, methods & values of psychiatry.'
Preface
Preface to the 1st Edition
Acknowledgments
The myth of mental illness
The mental health ethic
The rhetoric of rejection
Mental health as ideology
What psychiatry can & cannot do
Bootlegging humanistic values through psychiatry
The insanity plea & the insanity verdict
Involuntary mental hospitalization: a crime against humanity
Mental health services in the school
Psychiatry, the state & the university: the problem of the professional identity of academic psychiatry
Psychiatric classification as a strategy of personal constraint
Whither psychiatry?
Index

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Mental Health, Psychiatry, Essays, Politics

278 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Thomas Stephen Szasz (pronounced /sas/; born April 15, 1920 in Budapest, Hungary) was a psychiatrist and academic. He was Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse, New York. He was a prominent figure in the antipsychiatry movement, a well-known social critic of the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry, and of the social control aims of medicine in modern society, as well as of scientism. He is well known for his books, The Myth of Mental Illness (1960) and The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement which set out some of the arguments with which he is most associated.

Reviews

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thomas Szasz defines the right of the anti-psychiatry movement as R.D. Laing defines the left...probably. A psychoanalytically trained psychiatrist and emeritus professor at SUNY, you'd think he had it made in the establishment and, financially speaking, he likely did. But still, almost everything Dr. Szasz has published has been a radical critique of psychotherapeutics, psychiatry and academic psychology. His heroes are the iconoclastic individualists, ranging from the economists von Mises and Hayek through Freud to...(and here is where the "probably" came from) the prominent socialists Wilhelm Reich and Jack London.

Although I do not subscribe to the ideal of an unfettered capitalism and find his occasional bows to such naive economic theory offputting, I believe that Szasz's regard for the likes of Reich, London and others of that ilk indicate that his primary values are in fact individual liberty and dignity, irrespective of age, race, gender, nation or any other predication. In that, we agree.

Having been trained to be a psychotherapist myself, I have found Szasz's books a vital corrective and caution to what I was taught and to how, in jobs of that sort, this was put into practice--so effective a caution that he probably contributed to my hesitation in pursuing such a career--that and the ugliness of taking money for such "work" (viz. socialistic tendencies), that is.

Szasz's attitude is best summed up in his book on Schizophrenia which I'll cover some time. Basically, he claims that psychiatric (not neurology's) nosology has the status of medieval demonology. In other words, there are no such things as schizophrenia, bipolarity, affective disorders, attention deficit disorders--not in any scientific sense, not in any way more significant than the distinctions between orders of demons. The reason for this claim is that these conditions have no known physical aetiology. Oh, they may have statistically mapable correlatives such as are revealed by various neuro-imaging techniques, but there's no known bug, no bacterium or virus or lesion which can be shown to cause them--not as, say, tertiary syphillitic psychosis or certain forms of senile dementia can be demonstrated to have a material basis. The "causes" of such syndromes as come and go from one Diagnostic & Statistical Manual edition to another are instead, so far as we know, of a social and moral nature. Psychiatry is--or ought be--a moral, not a medical science.

Although emphasizing the rights of the client/patient and the duty of the psychiatrist to them, Szasz is not unmindful of the commonweal and of the rights of society. He has no problem with incarcerating those who are real threats to others--though he rejects the wholesale employment of insanity defenses and psychiatric imprisonment. Indeed, given the fact that institutional professionals will continue to serve their masters and that government has a role in protecting the masses from some antisocial behaviors, he makes the novel suggestion in his final essay that perhaps mental health professionals ought be distinguished as lawyers are, namely, as prosecuting (institutional) and defending (client-serving) psychotherapists.

[Pragya · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

[Mayo · Rating 3 out of 5]

se nota un poco a veces que szasz es liberal (mucho en el último capítulo) pero dice cosas bastante chulas e interesantes se me recomendó como introducción a la antipsiquiatria y al ser una recopilación de varios ensayos cortos toca varios temas asi que cumple

[Agnieszka Paulina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I struggle to comprehend that this book was publushed over 50 years ago. Szasz has managed to predict what would come of psychiatry pretty accurately. It is quite chilling.

Szasz utilises very clever language throughout his essays, which is something that I am extremely appreciative of. Szasz's utilises many interesting analogies, as well as a sophisticated use of language in order to get his point across and make an argument. With that being said, Szasz's arguments remain simple to comprehend, and serve as food for thought. One does not need prior knowledge or preparation in order to read this book, as it is very straightforward and easy to comprehend.

Szasz was so ahead of his time. I really enjoy Szasz's witty style of writing, and his willingness to scrutinise psychiatry. So bold, so clever. I am in awe.

[Loki · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting read; he makes good points, though politically I think he oversimplifies things a bit much. Let's just say mental illness isn't straightforward, and there is not a strict divide between the individual and the community, as Szaz imagines.

[James · Rating 1 out of 5]

A concept with some validity, carried to the point of absurdity; the author takes the concept that societal standards sometimes determine whether people and their conduct are deemed sane or crazy, and pushes it to the point of arguing that because this is subjective, there is objectively no such thing as insanity, and any diagnosis of mental illness amounts to an act of oppression of the individual by the mob. Of course, there are situations in which people are truly, unquestionably, objectively delusional. Thomas Szasz needs to take some basic coursework in logic, because he's written a book-length faulty syllogism.

[Aparna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting analysis of how the practice of psychiatry ought to be regulated, and the inconsistencies in the current framework, alongside other areas of medicine. It's a very rights-based, patient-autonomy based approach, as greatly opposed to the paternalistic, welfare-based approach in current UK legislation, and worldwide.

[lolo · Rating 5 out of 5]

.

[Sole Morgan · Rating 1 out of 5]

The content of this book is obsolete without a clear idea of what the US psychiatric context was like in the 1960s.
But even with it well in mind, it reads like a collection of delusions by a conspiracy theorist, or at least by someone who doesn't really know how human psychology works

[Valentín Serrano García · Rating 4 out of 5]

Obra de gran valor histórico.
Inauguró muchas escuelas y tendencias de debate dentro del campo de la salud mental. Parte de sus reflexiones siguen siendo muy válidas.