s/t: Mental Healing as Religion, Rhetoric & Repression

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 life’s 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 hand—physicians, patients, politicians, health insurance providers, and legal professionals—take 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 nondisease—genuine and imitation, truth and falsehood—thus 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.

The human mind abhors the absence of explanation, but full understanding is never possible. Human understanding is likely to be incomplete at best and, more often, utterly fallacious. To make matters worse, it is likely to be supported as truth and wisdom by religious and scientific authority, intellectual fashion and social convention. In Words to the Wise, Thomas Szasz offers a compendium of thoughts, observations, and aphorisms that address our understanding of a broad range of subjects, from birth to death. In this book, Szasz tackles a problem intrinsic to the human condition. What problem? In the words of the American humorist Josh Billings: "The trouble with people is not what they don't know but that they know so much that ain't so." Many of Thomas Szasz's books have been devoted to exposing what "ain't so" about mental illness and psychiatry. Here, Szasz applies the same skeptical spirit to the larger problem of people knowing much that "ain't so." About addiction, Szasz observes: "If a person ingests a drug prohibited by legislators and claims that it makes him feel better, that proves he is an addict; if he ingests a drug prescribed by a psychiatrist and claims that it makes him feel better, that proves that mental illness is a biomedical disease." About beauty: "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder; ugliness is in the personality of the beholden." About libertarians: "Libertarians regard liberty as contingent on the right to property; scientists regard disease as contingent on pathological alteration of the body. All libertarians reject the notion of 'socialist liberty, ' yet many accept the notion of 'mental disease.'" Or about power: "Many of my critics say I am hostile to medicine and physicians. They are wrong. I am hostile only to the power of the medical profession and of physicians." Szasz notes that despite enormous social pressure for a shared perspective on how the world works and how we ought to live, every person'saunderstanding, not only of himself, but of the world about him, is different from every other person's. This volume shows how the quest for truth is a never-ending challenge, and must presuppose an honest acceptance of questions, problems, and uncertainty.