Tag Archives: psychiatry

LewRockwell.com—No Excuses:The Reality Cure of Thomas Szasz—Szasz has been, for over 50 years, the gadfly of psychiatry

And you thought Tom Szasz was yesterday’s hero? This paper brings us up to date. Future historians may well cast Thomas Szasz as an intrepid campaigner for the blindingly obvious: people do not have “mental illnesses” but experience a wide range of moral, interpersonal, social and political “problems in living.” All such problems concern, or have an impact on, our sense of who and what we are and could just as easily be called spiritual crises. However, despite his prodigious scholarly output, Szasz might well be written out of history, as punishment for his single-handed and persistent exposure of the greatest hoax of the modern age – the construction of the “myth of mental illness” and psychiatry’s ludicrous attempts to “treat” it.

The Psychologist, UK: Madness, Myth and Medicine—the continuing relevance of Thomas Szasz, now in his 91st year

“Only after we abandon the pretence that mind is brain and that mental disease is brain disease can we begin the honest study of human behaviour and the means people use to help themselves and others cope with the demands of living” —Thomas Szasz. Fifty years ago American Psychologist published a seminal article by the Hungarian-born psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, “The myth of mental illness” (Szasz, 1960). The thesis was elaborated at length in a book of the same name a year later. As the decade got into full swing, Szasz’s critique of psychiatric theory and practice was herded into the same conceptual basket as the musings of Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing, and his erstwhile friend and collaborator David Cooper. The quite different ideas of these men came to be bracketed inappropriately under the rubric of “anti-psychiatry”—an expression coined by Cooper though disclaimed by Laing and rejected outright by Szasz.

Pharmaceutical Industry and Psychiatry—Conjoined Twins Joined at the Wallet, by former Pharma rep turned whistleblower

“Unlimited spending! Schedule all the programs you can.” That was the management directive announced at the regional business meeting I attended when I first became a pharmaceutical rep. When I heard the announcement I felt like I was on an Enron train that was roaring down the tracks, and the company expected everyone to be on board. The company was giving its sales force unlimited funds to hire physicians as paid speakers, sometimes to influence other physicians to prescribe the company’s drugs, at other times to simply financially reward physicians who wrote high volumes of prescriptions every month for the company’s drugs.

The BBC—new report challenges psychiatry’s billing bible, the DSM—”Mental Health: Are we all sick now?”

Diagnosing psychiatric illness has always been controversial, mental health experts say. Now some are worried that a new draft of the diagnostic ‘bible’ for mental health medicine could result in almost everyone being diagnosed with a mental condition. The diagnostic ‘bible’ in question is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association.