Thomas Stephen Szasz (/sɑːs/ SAHSS; Hungarian: Szász Tamás István [saːs]; 15 April 1920 – 8 September 2012) was a Hungarian-American academic and psychiatrist.
He was a staunch opponent of civil commitment and involuntary psychiatric treatment, but he believed in and practiced psychiatry and psychotherapy between consenting adults.
[3] Szasz completed his residency requirement at the Cincinnati General Hospital, then trained as a psychoanalyst at Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis from 1951 to 1956.
[12] In 1961, Szasz testified before a United States Senate Committee, arguing that using mental hospitals to incarcerate people defined as insane violated the general assumptions of the patient-doctor relationship, and turned the doctor into a warden and keeper of a prison.
Criticizing scientism, he targeted psychiatry in particular, underscoring its campaigns against masturbation at the end of the 19th century, its use of medical imagery and language to describe misbehavior, its reliance on involuntary mental hospitalization to protect society, and the use of lobotomy and other interventions to treat psychosis.
As a vastly elaborate social control system which disguises itself under the claims of being rational, systematic and therefore scientific, it constitutes a fundamental threat to freedom and dignity.
Szasz believed that if we accept that "mental illness" is a euphemism for behaviors that are disapproved of, then the state has no right to force psychiatric "treatment" on these individuals.
Similarly, the state should not be able to interfere in mental health practices between consenting adults (for example, by legally controlling the supply of psychotropic drugs or psychiatric medication).
To underscore this continuation of religion through medicine, he even takes as an example obesity: instead of concentrating on junk food (ill-nutrition), physicians denounced hypernutrition.
[14] The collaboration between psychiatry and government leads to what Szasz calls the therapeutic state, a system in which disapproved actions, thoughts, and emotions are repressed ("cured") through pseudomedical interventions.
[15][16]: 17 Thus suicide, unconventional religious beliefs, racial bigotry, unhappiness, anxiety, shyness, sexual promiscuity, shoplifting, gambling, overeating, smoking, and illegal drug use are all considered symptoms or illnesses that need to be cured.
[16]: 17 When faced with demands for measures to curtail smoking in public, binge-drinking, gambling or obesity, ministers say that "we must guard against charges of nanny statism.
[18]: 496 A secularization of God and the medicalization of good resulted in the post-Enlightenment version of this view: once people agree that they have identified the one true reason, it brings about that they have to guard against the temptation to worship unreason – that is, madness.
Citing Szasz's writings, legal reforms were enacted, and all 50 US states narrowed their criteria for involuntary commitment from the prior standard of "need for treatment"—causing the number of patients in public psychiatric hospitals to plummet, and the homeless population to balloon.
Just as legal systems work on the presumption that a person is innocent until proven guilty, individuals accused of crimes should not be presumed incompetent simply because a doctor or psychiatrist labels them as such.
Szasz argued that the insanity defense was a legal tactic invented to circumvent the punishments of the church, which at the time included confiscation of the property of those who committed suicide, often leaving widows and orphans destitute.
[28][page needed][29]: 661 In 1969, Szasz and the Church of Scientology co-founded the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) to oppose involuntary psychiatric treatments.
"[31] In a 2009 interview aired by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Szasz explained that he was an atheist and collaborated with Scientology only out of convenience, as an organization with money who were active in this cause.
[34] In 2011, Szasz published an essay in recognition of the 50th anniversary of The Myth of Mental Illness, which had been delivered as a plenary address at the 2010 International Congress of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in Edinburgh.