Thomas Szasz Quotes About Illness

Quotes about: Illness

• We achieve active mastery over illness and death by delegating all responsibility for their management to physicians, and by exiling the sick and the dying to hospitals. But hospitals serve the convenience of staff not patients: we cannot be properly ill in a hospital, nor die in one decently; we can do so only among those who love and value us. The result is the institutionalized dehumanization of the ill, characteristic of our age.

  Thomas Szasz

  Love, Responsibility, Sick

• Mental illness is a myth, whose function is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations.

  Thomas Szasz

  Pills, Moral, Bitter

  Thomas Szasz (2017). “Words to the Wise: A Medical-Philosophical Dictionary”, p.156, Routledge

• The Greeks distinguished between good and bad behavior, language that enhanced or diminished persons. Being intoxicated with scientism, we fail to recognize that the seemingly technical terms used to identify psychiatric illnesses and interventions are simply dyphemisms and euphemisms.

  Thomas Szasz

  Greek, Language, Failing

  "The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary". Book by Thomas Szasz, 1990.

• No further evidence is needed to show that 'mental illness' is not the name of a biological condition whose nature awaits to be elucidated, but is the name of a concept whose purpose is to obscure the obvious.

  Thomas Szasz

  Nature, Names, Purpose

  Thomas Szasz (2017). “Words to the Wise: A Medical-Philosophical Dictionary”, p.137, Routledge

• 'Psychotherapy' is a private, confidential conversation that has nothing to do with illness, medicine, or healing.

  Thomas Szasz

  Healing, Medicine, Illness

• The disease concept of homosexuality as with the disease concept of all so-called mental illnesses, such as alcoholism, drug addiction, or suicide conceals the fact that homosexuals are a group of medically stigmatized and socially persecuted individuals. ... Their anguished cries of protest are drowned out by the rhetoric of therapy just as the rhetoric of salvation drowned out the [cries] of heretics.

  Thomas Szasz

  Suicide, Addiction, Drug

  Thomas Stephen Szasz (1997). “The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement”, p.168, Syracuse University Press

• Mental illness, of course, is not literally a "thing" - or physical object - and hence it can "exist" only in the same sort of way in which other theoretical concepts exist.

  Thomas Szasz

  Bipolar, Way, Mental Illness

  "The Myth of Mental Illness" by Thomas Szasz in "American Psycholigist", Volume 15 (pp. 113-118), psychclassics.yorku.ca. 1960.

• There is no such thing as mental illness, hence also no such thing as psychotherapy.

  Thomas Szasz

  Mental Illness, Illness, Psychotherapy

• We shall therefore compare the concept of homosexuality as heresy, prevalent in the days of the witch-hunts, with the concept of homosexuality as mental illness, prevalent today.

  Thomas Szasz

  Today, Witch, Mental Illness

  Thomas Stephen Szasz (1997). “The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement”, p.160, Syracuse University Press

• By pretending that convention is Nature, that disobeying a personal prohibition is a medical illness, they establish themselves as agents of social control and at the same time disguise their punitive interventions in the semantic and social trappings of medical practice.

  Thomas Szasz

  Practice, Agents, Medical

  Thomas Stephen Szasz (1997). “The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement”, p.167, Syracuse University Press

• So long as men denounce each other as mentally sick (homosexual, addicted, insane, and so forth) so that the madman can always be considered the Other, never the Self mental illness will remain an easily exploitable concept, and Coercive Psychiatry a flourishing institution.

  Thomas Szasz

  Men, Self, Long

  Thomas Stephen Szasz (1997). “The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement”, p.170, Syracuse University Press

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