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
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
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
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.
The FDA calls certain substances "controlled." But there are no "controlled substances," there are only controlled citizens.
Mental illness is a myth, whose function is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations.
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.
Psychiatry does not commit human rights abuse. It is a human rights abuse.
The neurotic has problems; the psychotic has solutions.
Psychiatric expert testimony: mendacity masquerading as medicine.
The battle for the world is the battle for definitions.
By pretending that convention is Nature, that disobeying a personal prohibition is a medical illness, they establish themselves as agents of social control and at the same time disguise their punitive interventions in the semantic and social trappings of medical practice.
The homosexual is a scapegoat who evokes no sympathy. Hence, he can only be a victim, never a martyr.
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.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but they make a good excuse.