Thomas Szasz Quotes About Psychiatry

Quotes about: Psychiatry

• Involuntary mental hospitalization is like slavery. Refining the standards for commitment is like prettifying the slave plantations. The problem is not how to improve commitment, but how to abolish it

  Thomas Szasz

  Commitment, Slavery, Problem

• Psychiatry does not commit human rights abuse. It is a human rights abuse.

  Thomas Szasz

  Rights, Abuse, Doe

• Psychiatry is probably the single most destructive force that has affected American Society within the last fifty years.

  Thomas Szasz

  Years, Medicine, Fifty

• Aided and abetted by corrupt analysts, patients who have nothing better to do with their lives often use the psychoanalytic situation to transform insignificant childhood hurts into private shrines at which they worship unceasingly the enormity of the offenses committed against them. This solution is immensely flattering to the patients -- as are all forms of unmerited self-aggrandizement; it is immensely profitable for the analysts -- as are all forms pandering to people's vanity; and it is often immensely unpleasant for nearly everyone else in the patient's life.

  Thomas Szasz

  Hurt, Vanity, Self

• Institutional psychiatry is a continuation of the Inquisition. All that has really changed is the vocabulary and the social style. The vocabulary conforms to the intellectual expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-medical jargon that parodies the concepts of science. The social style conforms to the political expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-liberal social movement that parodies the ideals of freedom and rationality.

  Thomas Szasz

  Vocabulary, Expectations, Political

  Thomas Stephen Szasz (1997). “The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement”, p.27, Syracuse University Press

• The two greatest enemies of the individual in the modern world are communism and psychiatry. Each wages a relentless war against that which makes a person an individual: communism against the ownership of property, psychiatry against the ownership of the self (mind and body). Communists criminalize the autonomous use of capital and labor, and harshly punish those who "traffic" in the black market, especially in foreign currencies. Psychiatrists criminalize the autonomous use of the self, and harshly punish those who "traffic" in self-abuse, especially in self-medication and self-destruction.

  Thomas Szasz

  War, Self, Two

  Thomas Stephen Szasz (1990). “The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary”, Open Court Publishing Company

• I submit that the traditional definition of psychiatry, which is still vogue, places it alongside such things as alchemy and astrology, and commits it to the category of pseudo-science.

  Thomas Szasz

  Astrology, Pseudo, Definitions

• Is psychiatry a medical enterprise concerned with treating diseases, or a humanistic enterprise concerned with helping persons with their personal problems? Psychiatry could be one or the other, but it cannot--despite the pretensions and protestations of psichiatrists--be both.

  Thomas Szasz

  Disease, Helping, Medical

  Thomas Stephen Szasz (1997). “Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences”, p.324, Syracuse University Press

• Psychoanalysis is an attempt to examine a person's self-justifications. Hence it can be undertaken only with the patient's cooperation and can succeed only when the patient has something to gain by abandoning or modifying his system of self-justification.

  Thomas Szasz

  Self, Gains, Succeed

• Psychiatric expert testimony: mendacity masquerading as medicine.

  Thomas Szasz

  Medicine, Experts, Mendacity

  Thomas Stephen Szasz (2004). “Words to the Wise: A Medical-Philosophical Dictionary”, p.162, Transaction Publishers

• For Jews, the Messiah has never come; for Christians, He has come but once; for modern man, He appears and disappears with increasing rapidity. The saviors of modern man, the "scientists" who promise salvation through the "discoveries" of ethology and sociology, psychology and psychiatry, and all the other bogus religions, issue forth periodically, as if selected by some Messiah-of-the-Month Club.

  Thomas Szasz

  Christian, Men, Issues

  "The Second Sin (Science and Scientism)". Book by Thomas Szasz, 1973.

• 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

• Child psychology and child psychiatry cannot be reformed. They must be abolished.

  Thomas Szasz

  Children, Psychology, Psychiatry

• We have, in our day, witnessed the birth of the Therapeutic State. This is perhaps the major implication of psychiatry as an institution of social control.

  Thomas Szasz

  Birth, Social, States

  Thomas Szasz (2017). “Words to the Wise: A Medical-Philosophical Dictionary”, p.278, Routledge

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