Description
More than fifty years ago, Thomas Szasz showed that the concept of mental
illness-a disease of the mind-is an oxymoron, a metaphor, a myth.
Disease, in the medical sense, affects only the body. He also demonstrated
that civil commitment and the insanity defense, the paradigmatic practices
of psychiatry, are incompatible with the political values of personal responsibility
and individual liberty. The psychiatric establishment's rejection of
Szasz's critique posed no danger to his work: its defense of coercions and
excuses as "therapy" supported his argument regarding the metaphorical
nature of mental illness and the transparent immorality of brutal psychiatric
control masquerading as humane medical care.
In the late 1960s, the launching of the so-called antipsychiatry movement
vitiated Szasz's effort to present a precisely formulated conceptual
and political critique of the medical identity of psychiatry and of psychiatric
coercions and excuses. Led by the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing, the
antipsychiatrists used the term to attract attention to themselves and deflect
attention from what they did, which included coercions and excuses based
on psychiatric principles and power.
For this reason, Szasz rejected, and continues to reject, psychiatry and
antipsychiatry with equal vigor. Subsuming his work under the rubric of
antipsychiatry betrays and negates it just as surely and effectively as
subsuming it under the rubric of psychiatry. In Antipsychiatry: Quackery
Squared, Szasz powerfully argues that his writings belong to neither psychiatry
nor antipsychiatry. They stem from conceptual analysis, social-political
criticism, and common sense.
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