Thomas Szasz, who is considered the father of anti-psychiatry, died at the age of 92 at his home in Manlius, New York. Szasz was a psychiatrist whose 1961 book, “The Myth of Mental Illness,” questioned the legitimacy of his field and provided the intellectual foundation for generations of critics, patient advocates, and anti-psychiatry activists, making enemies of many of his fellow doctors.
He died after a fall, said his daughter Dr. Margot Szasz Peters.
We thought it would be interesting to bring you a brief summary of who this man was who came to have a lot of influence in the world of mental health, and what he thought regarding psychiatric treatment and mental illnesses.
Criticisms of Psychiatry
Dr. Szasz published his critique at a particularly vulnerable time for psychiatry. With Freudian theories beginning to fall out of favor, the field was trying to become more medically oriented and empirically based. Fresh from Freudian training, Dr. Szasz saw the medical foundation of psychiatry as shaky at best, and his book struck, positioning the discipline “in the company of alchemy and astrology.”
The book became a sensation within mental health circles, as well as a bible for those who felt underserved by the mental health system.
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Dr. Szasz argued against coercive treatment, such as involuntary confinement and the use of psychiatric diagnoses in court, calling both practices unscientific and unethical. He was quickly placed in the company of other prominent critics of psychiatry, including the Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman and the French philosopher Michel Foucault.
Edward Shorter, the author of “A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac” (1997), called Dr. Szasz “the greatest of anti-psychiatry intellectuals.”
“Together,” he added, “they tried very hard to keep people away from psychiatric treatments on the basis that if the patients really didn’t have brain diseases, their only real difficulties ‘were the problems of life.’”
This attack had some merit in the 1950s, says Dr. Shorter, but not after this, when the field began to develop more scientific approaches.
For skeptics in modern psychiatry, however, Dr. Szasz was a foundational figure. “We don’t subscribe to everything like their view that there is no such thing as mental illness,” says Vera Hassner Sharav, president and founder of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, an advocacy group. long-time patients and critics of the field. “But its message of people being designated as sick, labeled and then removed from society and prey to a drug-dominated industry – that’s where its value is.” After becoming known, Dr. Szasz only fueled the fire. From his base in the department of psychiatry at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, he wrote hundreds of articles and more than 30 books, including “Ideology and Insanity: Essays on the Psychiatric Dehumanization of Man” (1970). Psychiatric Dehumanization of Man) and “Psychiatric Slavery: When Confinement and Coercion Masquerade as Cure” (1977, Psychiatric Slavery: When Confinement and Coercion Masquerade as Cure).
In 1969, in a move that damaged his credibility even among his allies, he joined the Church of Scientology to found the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, which portrayed the camp as abusive and regularly picketed the camps. psychiatric meetings.
Dr. Szasz was not a Scientologist and later distanced himself from the church, but he shared the religion’s critical view of psychiatry. His provocations did not come for free. In the 1960s, New York mental health authorities, outraged by his attacks on the state system, blocked Dr. Szasz from teaching at a state hospital where residents were training, according to two former colleagues. Dr. Szasz was enraged but he had few resources and his teaching had diminished.
Dr. Szasz opposed the American Psychiatric Association’s expansion of diagnoses in its new manual.
“For the record, I will say that I admired him, even though he may have been completely wrong about schizophrenia,” says Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center, in Arlington, Virginia. , which supports stronger laws to ensure treatment for individuals with severe mental disorders. “But he made a great contribution to the issue of the misuse of psychiatry. His message is important today.”
Short biography
Thomas Stephen Szasz was born in Budapest on April 15, 1920, the second son of Julius Szasz, a lawyer, and Lily Wellisch. The family moved to Cincinnati in 1938, where the boy became a star student. He earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Cincinnati and graduated from the same university’s medical school in 1944.
After intern and residency, he enrolled at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, earning his diploma in 1950. He worked at the Chicago Institute and served in the United States Naval Reserve before joining the SUNY Upstate faculty.
His wife, Rosine, died in 1971. In addition to his daughter, Dr. Peters, he is survived by another daughter, Suzy Szasz Palmer; a brother, George and a grandson.
Dr. Szasz was highly sought after as a speaker and presented with dozens of national and international awards. To the end of his life he continued to discuss psychotherapy, a practice in which he was trained and of which he became skeptical.
“The goal is to take on more responsibility and therefore gain more freedom and more control over your own life,” he said of the therapy in a 2000 interview with the Web site . “The question or questions for the patient become the extent to which he is willing to recognize his evasions of responsibility, often called ‘symptoms’.”
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