Schizophrenia: The Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry [Paperback]

Thomas Stephen Szasz (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 237 pages
• Publisher: Syracuse Univ Pr (Sd) (March 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0815602243
• ISBN-13: 978-0815602248
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #471,050 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Straight Thought on a Serpentine Subject, June 14, 2001

By 

T. Rogers "Prof Digory Kirke" (Jackson, MS United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Schizophrenia: The Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry (Paperback)

Prof. Thomas Szasz recognizes that so-called mental illness which are not based in actualMEDICAL pathology are "diseases" only by the analogic and metaphorical qualities of language. Prof. Sasz maintains that the mind is not the brain, the mental functions are not reducible to brain functions, and that so-called "mental diseases" are not disases but are refelctions and manifestations of the way persons deal with problems-in-living. Because of his respect for human dignity and human freedom, Szasz is a classical liberal whose writings are compatible with the freedom and liberty issues characteristic of the so-called "right wing" section of the political and spectrum. Szasz is incisive, pungent, brilliant, insightful on the role of the threaputic industry within the totalitarian state and the uses of psychiatric voodoo for control of persons and thought. Accordingly, he comes across as a spokesperson of the liberty-freedom perspective -- what Alice in Wonderland said is the same thing as love, namely, minding one's own business. AS Szasz, points out, the psychiatric concept of "disease" attempts to make the mind, will and emotions a material object which supposedly can be "treated". His view of human freedom shapes his view of politics. The "mental" illness are social constructions in the form of political arrangments for exerting power over other beings -- exactly what the Totalitarlian Left sets itself to accomplish with self-rightous vigor. The various functional mental illness are real behaviors, but they are that, behaviors, not diseases or "symptoms" of "disease". Statists, who begin with an ethic of control, tend to oppose Szazian thought. Szasz, who does not begin with a political platform, does article values of freedom and recognition of the religious and ideological nature of psychiatric voodoo, does make conclusions which are favorable to human freedom rather than to a global psychiatric ward. Prof. Szasz presents is one of the foremost, perhaps the foremost challenge to the theology of psychiatry and the efforts of that psychiatry to subject mankind to its impirmatur.

15 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Neither cruel nor offensive: compassionate and rational, August 31, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Schizophrenia: The Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry (Paperback)

T.S. Szasz reminds us that schizophrenia never existed in any medical records before the 20th century. It is an invention, or merely a new label for a kind of behaviour that previously belonged to other medical or social classifications.

As most of his readers already know, Szasz rightly believes that there ain't no such thing as a mental illness. Not as long as we mean "illness" like we mean it when we speak of any "illnesses" except the so-called "mental" ones. What we call mental illness is actually merely a certain kind of (litteraly) /abnormal/ (out of the norm) behaviour.

Schizophrenia is a myth.

A must read for open-minded people not too obsessed with that "libertarian-conservative" sticker...

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A WELL-KNOWN CRITIC OF PSYCHIATRY ATTACKS A FAVORITE TARGET, August 11, 2010

By 

Steven H. Propp (Sacramento, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Schizophrenia: The Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry (Paperback)

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.

He states in the Preface to this 1976 book, "In this book I shall try to show how schizophrenia has become the Christ on the cross that psychiatrists worship ... and how our understanding of both psychiatry and schizophrenia may be advanced by approaching this 'diagnosis' as if it pointed to a religious symbol rather than to a medical disease."

Here are some representative quotations from the book:

"Real medicine thus helps real physicians to treat or cure real patients; fake medicine (psychiatry) helps fake physicians (psychiatrists) to influence or control fake patients (the mentally sick)."
"Briefly put, I have maintained that the intervention institutional psychiatrists call 'mental hospitalization' is, in fact, a form of imprisonment; that the imposition of such loss of liberty on innocent persons is immoral (and, in the United States, unconstitutional); and that the phenomenon psychiatrists call 'schizophrenia' is not a demonstrable medical disease but the name of certain kinds of social deviation (or of behavior unacceptable to the speaker)."
"But if all so-called mental disease is brain disease, if all mental disease is really only the 'mental symptom' of conditions such as paresis and pellagra---then it makes no sense to have two classes of brain diseases: one neurological, and the other mental. Instead, it would be necessary to insist ... that mental diseases are not diseases at all..."
"The greatest symbolic and social power of 'schizophrenia' lies precisely in its being inextricably tied to the idea of disease and the institution of medicine. Thus, an effort to offer a nonmedical model for schizophrenia is about as feasible, and futile, as would be the effort to offer a nontheological model for the Eucharist."