Anti-psychiatry:quackery Squared Format: Hardcover

More than fifty years ago, Thomas Szasz showed that the concept of mentalillness―a disease of the mind―is an oxymoron, a metaphor, a myth.Disease, in the medical sense, affects only the body. He also demonstratedthat civil commitment and the insanity defense, the paradigmatic practicesof psychiatry, are incompatible with the political values of personal responsibilityand individual liberty. The psychiatric establishment’s rejection ofSzasz’s critique posed no danger to his work: its defense of coercions andexcuses as “therapy” supported his argument regarding the metaphoricalnature of mental illness and the transparent immorality of brutal psychiatriccontrol masquerading as humane medical care.In the late 1960s, the launching of the so-called antipsychiatry movementvitiated Szasz’s effort to present a precisely formulated conceptualand political critique of the medical identity of psychiatry and of psychiatriccoercions and excuses. Led by the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing, theantipsychiatrists used the term to attract attention to themselves and deflectattention from what they did, which included coercions and excuses basedon psychiatric principles and power.For this reason, Szasz rejected, and continues to reject, psychiatry andantipsychiatry with equal vigor. Subsuming his work under the rubric ofantipsychiatry betrays and negates it just as surely and effectively assubsuming it under the rubric of psychiatry. In Antipsychiatry: QuackerySquared, Szasz powerfully argues that his writings belong to neither psychiatrynor antipsychiatry. They stem from conceptual analysis, social-politicalcriticism, and common sense.