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A Lexicon of Lunacy: Metaphoric Malady, Moral Responsibility, and Psychiatry

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Chances are, if you find a screed about the evils of mainstream psychiatry or psychology, you can find scientology behind it. Szasz has worked with scientology to found and fund anti-psychiatric organizations. Take his words with a bucketful of grains of salt.

Thomas Szasz (born 1920) is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the State University of New York Health Science Center. He is a well-known critic of psychiatry, of the social role of medicine in modern society, and is a social libertarian.

Szasz states in the Preface to this 1993 book, "This book consists of two parts. Part I is a critical reflection on the extraordinary profusion of terms in American English for behaviors conventionally called 'mental illnesses,' together with as complete a listing of such terms as I have been able to assemble... Part II is a collection of previously published papers that illustrate our propensity to use the language of mental illness to influence social relationships---in particular, to reduce or annul personal responsibility by shifting it from self to others or to the fiction of mental illness."

Here are some representative quotations from the book:

"I took up the profession of psychiatry in part to debunk the biological-reductionist impulse that has motivated its very origin and that continues to fuel its engines; in other words, to combat the contention that abnormal behaviors must be understood as the products of abnormal brains."

"(P)sychiatrists ... realize that their entire enterprise hinges on society's acceptance of the proposition that human beings diagnosed as mentally ill have a brain disease that deprives them of free will."

"Unlike regular physicians ... psychiatrists labor under the unremitting pressure of cultural forces to slap approving or disapproving labels on certain behaviors."

"Nevertheless, psychoanalysis is a pseudomedical cult, with its secret archives in Washington, and its holy shrine in London."

"I should like to reiterate that the very idea of giving rights to the mental patient expresses, once again, society's collective contempt of him; and that the mental patient's failure to protest against this ritual reinforces society's collective sense of being justified in patronizing him."