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Synopsis
Every age, labels others to a particular fate, such as the witch consigned to the fire. The priest has now been replaced by the psychiatrist and this text examines the role of medicine as a more insidious tyrant than religion, as it claims to be beneficial to both the patient and the commonwealth.
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Szasz's classic work takes a critical look at the social definition of mental illness and compares it to the medieval witch crazes. The book outraged the psychiatric profession in its time, but Szasz's analysis has not lost any of its potency or accuracy, and moral questions about mental illness / sanity are no less vital to contemporary society. Essential reading for anyone in the caring professions.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A mint book showing what the institution of psychiatry has inherited from the inquistion and ultimately about the metanarrative of the systematic oppression and subjugation of the few by the many in human history. Unsurprisingly, Szasz has been treated like a secular heretic by many of the obscurants in the Psychiatric establishment for this and many other works.
He cogently reasons that in our age of strange transpositions and inversions, mostly unwitting malefactors delude themselves that they are the benefactors of those arbitrairily labelled 'the mentally ill' (a term he understands to be something of a misnomer and oppressive and dehumanising in its semantics and commonly held association with inferiority) by a society all too quick to stigmatise and pathologise those who don't observe the proprieties of their particular society.
In a society where at least a subset of the population love to pillory, stigmatise and mercilessly torment people based on the flimsiest of pretexts, the whole oppresive nomenclature of psychiatry, along with its apparatus and practitioners, need to be questioned. As Szasz says, 'words have a life of their own' (or was it George Formby?).
To paraphrase a character in Luis Bunuel's great film 'the Phantom of Liberty', our values and beliefs are relative and not absolute, and nowhere is this more relevant a basic truth regarding current attitudes amongst laypeople and the axioms of psychiatry that are flaunted as if they were absolute truths. Yet no one is a more redoubtable opponent than a psychiatrist who, in his/her insitutionalised irrationality, actually believes in the rightness of their own nonsense.
This was mint.
He cogently reasons that in our age of strange transpositions and inversions, mostly unwitting malefactors delude themselves that they are the benefactors of those arbitrairily labelled 'the mentally ill' (a term he understands to be something of a misnomer and oppressive and dehumanising in its semantics and commonly held association with inferiority) by a society all too quick to stigmatise and pathologise those who don't observe the proprieties of their particular society.
In a society where at least a subset of the population love to pillory, stigmatise and mercilessly torment people based on the flimsiest of pretexts, the whole oppresive nomenclature of psychiatry, along with its apparatus and practitioners, need to be questioned. As Szasz says, 'words have a life of their own' (or was it George Formby?).
To paraphrase a character in Luis Bunuel's great film 'the Phantom of Liberty', our values and beliefs are relative and not absolute, and nowhere is this more relevant a basic truth regarding current attitudes amongst laypeople and the axioms of psychiatry that are flaunted as if they were absolute truths. Yet no one is a more redoubtable opponent than a psychiatrist who, in his/her insitutionalised irrationality, actually believes in the rightness of their own nonsense.
This was mint.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Szasz's classic work takes a critical look at the social definition of mental illness and compares it to the medieval witch crazes. The book outraged the psychiatric profession in its time, but Szasz's analysis has not lost any of its potency or accuracy, and moral questions about mental illness / sanity are no less vital to contemporary society. Essential reading for anyone in the caring professions.
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