Psychiatry, Thomas Szasz
Psychiatry, Thomas Szasz
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Psychiatry
The Science of Lies

Author: Thomas Szasz

Narrator: Tom Weiner

Unabridged: 4 hr 38 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/14/2010

Categories: Nonfiction, Psychology


Synopsis

For more than half a century, Thomas Szasz has devoted much of his career to a radical critique of psychiatry. His latest work, Psychiatry: The Science of Lies, is a culmination of his lifes work: to portray the integral role of deception in the history and practice of psychiatry. Szasz argues that the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness stands in the same relationship to the diagnosis and treatment of bodily illness that the forgery of a painting does to the original masterpiece. Art historians and the legal system seek to distinguish forgeries from originals. Those concerned with medicine, on the other handphysicians, patients, politicians, healthinsurance providers, and legal professionalstake the opposite stance when faced with the challenge of distinguishing everyday problems in living from bodily diseases, systematically authenticating nondiseases as diseases. The boundary between disease and nondiseasegenuine and imitation, truth and falsehoodthus becomes arbitrary and uncertain. There is neither glory nor profit in correctly demarcating what counts as medical illness and medical healing from what does not. Individuals and families wishing to protect themselves from medically and politically authenticated charlatanry are left to their own intellectual and moral resources to make critical decisions about human dilemmas miscategorized as mental diseases and about medicalized responses misidentified as psychiatric treatments. Delivering his sophisticated analysis in lucid prose and with a sharp wit, Szasz continues to engage and challenge readers of all backgrounds.

About Thomas Szasz

Thomas Szasz is professor emeritus of psychiatry at the State University of New York’s Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York. His books include Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry; The Manufacture of Madness; Ideology and Insanity; Ceremonial Chemistry; The Myth of Psychotherapy; Pharmacracy, and many more.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Shea

"[F]actual error validated as Doctrinal Truth is essential for the survival of organizations whose aim is to satisfy man's unquenchable thirst to be relieved of the burden of moral responsibility." A fitting summation to Szasz criticism of psychiatry as a whole, in this book. Apparently, he built an......more

The idea that psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia, alcoholism, ADHD and depression are illnesses ‘just like any other disease’ is obvious nonsense. If these conditions are diseases, which depends how we define ‘disease’, they are clearly diseases very unlike the infections of pathogens with whi......more

Goodreads review by Can

Ortaçağda kiliseyi eleştirmek nasıl karşılanıyorsa günümüzde eğitim, psikiyatri gibi modern kurumları da eleştirmek öyle karşılanıyor. Bu kurumları eleştirmek için ya akılsız olmalısınız ya da bilgisiz. Kiliseyi geri plana öteleyen modernite kendi putlarını mı yerine koyuyor yoksa? Ya da gerçekten s......more