Thomas Stephen Szasz ( SAHSS; Hungarian: Szász Tamás István [saːs]; 15 April 1920 – 8 September 2012) was a Hungarian-American academic and psychiatrist. He served for most of his career as professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University. 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. Szasz maintained throughout his career that he was not anti-psychiatry but rather that he opposed coercive psychiatry. He was a staunch opponent of civil commitment and involuntary psychiatric treatment but believed in and practiced psychiatry and psychotherapy that involved consenting adults.
Life Szasz was born on April 15, 1920, in Budapest, Hungary, the second son of Jewish parents Gyula and Lily Szász. In 1938, the family moved to the United States, where he attended the University of Cincinnati for his Bachelor of Science in physics, followed by an MD. Szasz completed his residency requirement at the Cincinnati General Hospital, then trained as a psychoanalyst at Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis from 1951 to 1956. He took a position as a professor at State University of New York in 1956 and received tenure in 1962, taking 24 months out for duty as a practicing psychiatrist with the U.S. Naval Reserve. Szasz had two daughters. His wife, Rosine, died in 1971.
Career Thomas Szasz was a strong critic of institutional psychiatry and was a prolific writer. According to psychiatrist Tony B. Benning, there were "three major themes in Szasz's writings: his contention that there is no such thing as mental illness, his contention that individual responsibility is never compromised in those suffering from what is generally considered as mental illness, and his perennial interest in calling attention to the political nature of psychiatric diagnosis". According to Williams and Caplan, Szasz is "best known for his view that without a diagnosis of neurological disease or damage, a psychiatric diagnosis was meaningless". Szasz first presented his attack on "mental illness" as a legal term in 1958 in the Columbia Law Review. In his article he argued that mental illness was no more a fact bearing on a suspect's guilt than is possession by the devil. His books The Myth of Mental Illness (1961) and The Manufacture of Madness (1970) set out some of the arguments most associated with him. In 1961, Szasz testified before a United States Senate committee, arguing that using mental hospitals to incarcerate people defined as insane violated the general assumptions of the patient–doctor relationship, and turned the doctor into a warden and keeper of a prison. Szasz was convinced there was a metaphorical character to mental disorders, and its uses in psychiatry were frequently injurious. He set himself a task to delegitimize legitimating agencies and authorities, and what he saw as their vast powers, enforced by psychiatrists and other mental health professionals, mental health laws, mental health courts, and mental health sentences. Szasz was a critic of the influence of modern medicine on society, which he considered to be the secularization of religion's hold on humankind. Criticizing scientism, he targeted psychiatry in particular, underscoring its campaigns against masturbation at the end of the 19th century, its use of medical imagery and language to describe misbehavior, its reliance on involuntary mental hospitalization to protect society, and the use of lobotomy and other interventions to treat psychosis. Szasz consistently paid attention to the power of language in the establishment and maintenance of the social order, both in small interpersonal and in wider social, economic, and/or political spheres.
Death Szasz's colleague Jeff Schaler described his death as a suicide. Szasz ended his own life on September 8, 2012, after suffering a painful spinal-compression fracture from a recent fall. Szasz had previously argued for the right to die in his writings. By Schaler's account, the exact method of suicide is unknown: "It is not known whether the prescription for pain pills is what he [Szasz] used to end his life." Considering this and moreover without Schaler's account, Szasz's death cannot absolutely be considered a suicide.
Positions
Mental illness as a myth In Szasz's view, people who are said to have a mental illness only have "problems in living". Diagnoses of "mental illness" or "mental disorder" are passed off as scientific but are judgments (of disdain) to support certain uses of power by authorities. In that line of thinking, schizophrenia becomes not the name of a disease entity but a judgment of extreme psychiatric and social disapprobation. Szasz called schizophrenia "the sacred symbol of psychiatry" because those so labeled have long provided and continue to provide justification for psychiatric theories, treatments, abuses, and reforms. Szasz argued that psychiatry is a pseudoscience that parodies medicine by using medical-sounding words and that, supported by the state through various Mental Health Acts, it has become a modern secular state religion. As a vastly elaborate social control system that disguises itself under the claims of being rational, systematic, and therefore scientific, it constitutes a fundamental threat to freedom and dignity. In The Myth of Mental Illness he argued that people can only play "the mental illness game" if their partner and those around them play a complementary role – a situation that would later be described as codependency.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
