The Medicalization of Everyday Life: Selected Essays [Paperback]

Thomas Szasz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2007

Defining "medicalization" as the perception of nonmedical conditions as medical problems and nondiseases as diseases, Thomas Szasz has devoted much of his career to exposing the dangers of "medicalizing" the conditions of some who simply refuse to conform to society's expectations. Szasz argues that modern psychiatry's tireless ambition to explain the human condition has led to the treatment of life's difficulties and oddities as clinical illnesses rather than as humanity revealed in its fullness.

This collection of impassioned essays, published between 1973 and 2006, chronicles the author's long campaign against the orthodoxies of psychiatry. From "Medicine to Magic" to "Medicine as Social Control," the book delves into the fascinating history of medicalization, including "The Discovery of Drug Addiction," "Persecutions for Witchcraft and Drugcraft," and "Food Abuse and Foodaholism." In a society that has little tolerance for those who live outside its rules, Dr. Szasz's writings are as relevant today as ever.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Psychiatrist Szasz, professor emeritus at SUNY Upstate Medical University, continues his iconoclastic career in this short book of essays (previously published in journals) spanning much of his professional life. He details how the medical and legal systems have combined to form a new type of government: the pharmacracy. Examples include improving public health through coercive paternalism (read: bans on smoking and transfat). This, Szasz states, is a crime, and psychiatry is the prima facie culprit, a structure built on oppression. Szasz reiterates his longstanding idea that mental illness is not a disease and drugs cannot treat the mind, which is an abstraction, not a physical entity. Szasz is principally concerned with the individual's freedom from the state. In Killing as Therapy: The Case of Terri Schiavo, he asserts that the withdrawal of life support from Schiavo was emblematic of doctors waging a war on autonomy (since Schiavo's own desire in the matter was not known). But all is not tirade; Szasz can be subtly humorous: Being officially nuts is like being officially heretical or un-American, not like being infected with malaria. This is a wonderful, impassioned book that is, considering the recent media attention to psychopharmaceuticals, a welcome investigation of the social ramifications involved. (Oct.)
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About the Author

Thomas Szasz is professor emeritus of psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University, Syracuse, New York. His books include Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry, The Manufacture of Madness, Ideology and Insanity, Our Right to Drugs, The Myth of Psychotherapy, and Pharmacracy, all published by Syracuse University Press.

Product Details

• Paperback: 202 pages
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press (October 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0815608675
• ISBN-13: 978-0815608677
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #120,272 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Be prepared to be jolted, February 9, 2008

By 

J. C Clark "eanna" (Overland Park, KS United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Medicalization of Everyday Life: Selected Essays (Paperback)

If this doesn't challenge a few deeply held beliefs you are either comatose or Dr. Szasz yourself. Boy, this one just wrestles everything you think about mental health and forces you to contemplate just what you know vs what you've been told, and accept because the person telling you had a pile of degrees and a white jacket. I include 3 quotes here to give you a flavor:

The old quacks peddled fake cures to treat real diseases. The new quacks peddle fake diseases to justify chemical pacification and medical coercion. The old quacks were politically harmless: they could harm individuals only with those individuals' consent. The new quacks are a serious threat to individual liberty and personal responsibility: they are agents of the therapeutic state who can and do harm individuals both with and without those individuals' consent. Theocracy is the alliance of religion with the state. Pharmacracy is the alliance of medicine with the state

Today virtually any unwanted behavior, from shopaholism and kleptomania to sexaholism and pedophilia, may be defined as a disease whose diagnosis and treatment belong in the province of the medical system. Disease-making thus has become similar to lawmaking. Politicians, responsive to tradition and popular opinion, can define any act, from teaching slaves to read to the cold-blooded murder of a bank guard, as a crime whose control belongs in the province of the criminal justice system.

Formerly, the people rushed to embrace totalitarian states. Now they rush to embrace the therapeutic state. By the time they discover the therapeutic state is about tyranny, not therapy, it will be too late.

Dr. Szasz is unfortunately fighting a losing battle as we trade freedom for comfort, eagerly handing over our children, our health, and our choices to experts who know more than we do. Well, do they? Who says so? They do, over and over and over. And we have allowed ourselves to stop believing things we know, as those white-coated experts have assured us we do not know. Only they do. And they will act in our best interests. Read his account of his trial testimony. It is wildly funny, brilliantly effective, and scathingly brutal. Psychiatry is used to dispose of unwanted people. What will prevent you from becoming such a person?

34 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars when reviewing, it is helpful to read the book, December 9, 2007

By 

Tatiana Neroni (USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Medicalization of Everyday Life: Selected Essays (Paperback)

A reader who can say this book is about criticizm of a public policy banning smoking and transfats has to be "selectively inattentive" to say the least.

Character assassination is an ancient technique when the critic does not have enough quality arguments to oppose the arguments he does not like in a civilized manner. Therefore, Professor Szasz is portrayed as an "iconoclast", his ideas are taken out of context and ridiculed in a supposedly neutral editorial review.

While the authors of review are busy laughing at Professor Szasz, Professor Szasz did not actually "discover America" by saying that mental illness is a fake, he definitely is not the first person who has criticized psychiatrists for their ways and he is definitely in good company exposing the psychiatric "industry".

Daniel Defo, Fyodor Dostoyevskiy, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Jonathan Swift, to name a few renouned humanists and intellectual giants, have been criticizing "mad-doctoring" as a form of social control and oppression driven exclusively by greed. These writers described enough cases when sane people pronounced insane and locked up where just unwanted wives, and members of low-status social or ethnic groups. Professor Szasz is describing an enlightening history of psychiatric abuse that is actually worth reading just for the sake of information he has generously discovered and provided for the public.

It is also easy to ascertain the truth of what Professor Szasz is saying, irrespective of the fact if you like his "iconoclastic career" or not. People not lazy to reach out and read the book Professor Szasz is criticizing, namely, the psychiatric diagnostic Bible DSM can see what KIND of symptoms are regarded as pathological and how those diagnoses are designed (if you take any two symptoms out of 8 in this column and any 3 out of 6 in that column...). Then it pays to analyze thyself and ask thyself how many mental disorders you can easily ascribe to ANYBODY around you including yourself and your loved ones. It is not evidence that everybody around you is sick, it is rather evidence that DSM-IV makers are greedy, and financial ties of the majority of DSM-making experts to drug manufacturers have been recently exposed in the media.

Out of professional good faith it should not have been too much trouble for the editorial review board to open the book they were officially reviewing, say, on page 21 (Chapter "Diagnosis: from description to prescription"). The whole idea of the book is there - with proof and reliable references. And it is definitely not about tobacco or diet. When reviewing, it helps to actually review.

As a long-time repeat customer of Amazon.com I am appalled at the bias and disrespect with which the editorial review is written. Such bias to one author raises issues of quality of editorial reviews for all other books trading on Amazon.com. Note to Amazon.com management: it pays to be fair.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars excellent book, July 7, 2008

By 

Stephen Prince (Santa Cruz, CA, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Medicalization of Everyday Life: Selected Essays (Paperback)

This book is a collection of important essays by a leading expert in the subject of psychiatry. Dr. Szasz tells it like it really is. As a long-term activist in the anti-psychiatry movement, I highly recommend this book.