56 of 63 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Truth About Liars, September 30, 2008
This review is from: Psychiatry: The Science of Lies (Hardcover)
In this short, lean and eloquent brief of a book rich in historical analysis and lucid in deductive reasoning, Thomas Szasz makes the case that the professionals in the mental health field are "au fond" experts in pretending to be experts. He writes, "Being an expert in mental illness is like being an expert about ghosts and unicorns."
Mr. Szasz proves how the concept of mental illness is void of content. (In biological illness, there is some damage or lesion to the cell. In "psychological illness," there is only a diagnosis, nothing else.)
Mr. Szasz shows how real science, physical science, methodically and clinically works to resolve illnesses and he shows, by contrast, how the so-called behavioral sciences "treat" a so-called "mentally ill" individual merely by giving the "patient" a diagnosis.
Mr. Szasz names names and reveals their charlatanry and theatrical hocus-pocus, from Charcot and Freud to so-called psychotherapists of the present.
This book allows the reader to look afresh at what constitutes personal responsibility and feel refreshed from the burdens of a state-supported circus.
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45 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Liberating Read. Highly Recommended, October 9, 2008
This review is from: Psychiatry: The Science of Lies (Hardcover)
Szasz provides a fascinating, brilliantly researched look at the historic origins of psychiatry's efforts to invent a medical role for itself. Examining the letters and papers of Freud, Charcot and many other late 19th century psychopathologists, up to the present, Szasz makes compelling arguments that psychiatry has been reassigning social nonconformity to the role of disease.
Individuals whose behaviors were once considered sinful, unconventional, or otherwise unwanted, can now be forced to undergo a "cure." In its role as "doctor," psychiatry functions to exert social control and dominance over its "patients--" many of whom are coerced and destroyed by what psychiatry pretends will heal them.
In a blackly humorous way, by its own standards of mental illness, psychiatry has arguably become a disease in itself. Its practitioners are marked by symptoms of grandiosity, narcissism, and excessive controlling behaviors to the point of psychotic obsession and delusions of power over other lives. One suspects that beneath the grandiosity lies an essential mediocrity and an overwhelming need to reduce others to a lowest common denominator, so as to assert the superiority of the psychiatrists, and thus overcome their own innate insecurities at having been so ordinary. To compensate for this insecurity, they punish what is different, and plow seeds of self doubt into the consciousness of their targets.
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12 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
the fraud that is freud, September 14, 2010
This review is from: Psychiatry: The Science of Lies (Hardcover)
No doubt about it -- Dr. Szasz is a national treasure.
I first was introduced to his myth of mental illness thesis while taking a medical ethics course in college a long time ago. The therapeutic state claimed the right to practice slavery under the aegis of helping individuals overcome behaviors that it had classified - rather conveniently -- as "diseases."
Long time fans will not find much in this book that is new, but it is the perfect volume for giving to open minded people who might never have thought about psychiatry or the pervasive power it wields in so many areas of life now. Too often, criticisms of this pristine fraud are assumed to be Scientologists, but Szasz first published his theory in 1961 and as his latest work shows, there were plenty of perceptive people who had figured out the lie that is psychiatry in the 19th century, when the field was first revving up.
Szasz briefly reiterates the problem of "mental illness," noting its deficit in being able to describe, verify, treat or identify the underlying somatic causes for "bad behavior" using science. Psychiatrists rely heavily on shabby metaphors in their diagnostic ruminations. The author's logic is short, sweet and delivered with an irreverent humor that is truly inimitable. The glum should pass this book by.
Psychiatry is a form of pseudologism in which patient and doctor sometimes collaborate to make a big lie. If you want to be diagnosed with depression, you - a would be patient - simply have to learn what words, phrases and mannerisms to ape in front of the doctor in order to achieve an end, be it prescription drugs, official declaration of mental incapacity by virtue of "disease" or, for the adventurous, commitment to a mental hospital. The doctor then plays along with the given cues to make the aspiration an objective scientific fact. There are no genetic tests, there are no brain scans. Or, in the rare case they are given, they cannot pinpoint the source for unconventional behavior. In short, no true diagnostic procedure ever has to be performed that can correlate what a person's behavior is - faked or otherwise -- with any somatic component in their system.
Schizophrenia, the blue ribbon of crazy, has had more physical explanations given over the past century than Carters has pills. Yet Nancy Andreason, head priestess of the schizo diagnosticians, confesses that she wished someone would finally nail down the real physical culprit so that the metaphor could at least become a verifiable scientific fact. If history is any indication, she shouldn't be too expectant about this likelihood. The gamut from blood platelets to malformed brains has been passed off as the physical pathological agent and each in turn has been discarded for lack of scientific evidence. One author has shown that the rate of spontaneous remission for schizophrenics is 50% or more, certainly a widespread, repeating miracle for such a debilitating disease. A clever and determined person could easily get himself diagnosed as a schizophrenic in order to get admitted to an asylum (two subjects in the book, both psychiatrists, do this very thing). To accomplish the same deception for something like melanoma is out of the question since it can't be faked.
In other, not so happy instances, psychiatry is a legal tool that can be used by quacks to deprive individuals of their liberty. The latter has become far more overt on a social level and is treated at great lengths in Szasz's Pharmacracy.
The current volume devotes much of its attention to Freud, the great patriarch of psychoanalysis. Readers are treated to Herr Doktor's own reflections on his motivations and inspirations for entering the nascent field as a young pup newly minted with a medical degree.
A poor empiricist with no prospects for practicing real medicine in Vienna, a city overrun with doctors, 29 year old Freud became tired of living in his parents' basement, pining for some miraculous revelation that would lead him from obscurity into the halls of great thinkers. Fortunately, he found his muse in the French physician Charcot. Although credited with many important scientific discoveries in medicine, Charcot turned his attention to the area of psychopathology, gaining in the process a reputation as a brilliant pioneer and becoming the object of worship of a smitten Freud.
Szasz relays the adulatory language of Freud towards his new mentor in order to show that ego, vanity and outright human weakness are the key ingredients of early psychoanalysis. The weird cultish devotion of so many "followers" for the gurus like Freud are evidence that something quite other than pure science informed the interests of its early apostles.
Like religion, psychiatry rests on the cult of personality and dogma. When psychiatrists talk about themselves or their area of expertise, they use words normally reserved for belief, faith and hope. Someone might think reasonably that the field outgrew its early limitations, maturing in the process into a real science. (Remember that before there was chemistry, there was alchemy.) Yet as the author shows, the field has remained dominated by hucksters. The latter part of the book discusses some of these figures, including a much-praised "dean" of modern psychology who replayed the Rosenhans experiment. Rosenhans was an early 20th century shrink who fooled a mental asylum into believing that he was a schizophrenic. He chronicled his "experiment" and became something of a very minor celebrity for his efforts; yet strangely, the prestige of psychiatry only continued to grow. Filled with all the solipsism that only a female can carry, she was unable to provide any data or documentations for her experiment. Other examples abound in the pages here, all funny but sad. The field is just as loopy now as it was when Charot and Freud were around.
Few Americans will ever know how influential Thomas Szasz has been in discrediting a field that has done incalculable damage to people over many decades. Today, psychiatry is in decline, enrollments in its schools are dropping and its overall reputation is only slightly higher than phrenology's. It deserves to be pushed to the rubbish pile.
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