Thomas Szasz Quotes About Mental Illness

Quotes about: Mental Illness

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  If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.

  Thomas Szasz

  Depression, Prayer, Humorous

  The Second Sin "Schizophrenia" (1973)

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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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