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Psychiatry: The Science of Lies |
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Thomas Szasz is an atheist libertarian and not a Scientologist. He views schizophrenia as a behaviour choice, rejects all physical etiologies of "insanity" and is opposed to all involuntary commitment to mental hospitals. Thomas Szasz is an honorable warrior for truth whose importance will only be recognized in coming decades. |
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"Psychiatry-a term I use here to include psychoanalysis, psychology, and all the so-called mental health professions- is one the most important institutions of modern societies. The institution rests squarely on the postulate proposition that "mental illness is an illness like any other illness." That proposition is a lie. This lie is what makes malingering-the faking of disease-the great secret of psychiatry: a popular understanding that faking illness is a form of deception (and often self-deception) would destroy psychiatry. In this book I try to advance such understanding, and the constructive destruction it entails, by expanding on my thesis, first propounded more than a half century ago: the idea of mental illness and the apparatus of modern psychiatry as a medical specialty rest on the successful medicalization of malingering-that is, on the popular perception of behaviors called "mental illnesses" as bona fide medical diseases." (Psychiatry: The Science of Lies, Thomas Szasz, 2008 AD, p x)
"I have tried to show that professionals in the mental health field are, an fond, impostors, pretending to have expertise they cannot possess. Being an expert about mental illnesses is like being an expert about ghosts or unicorns. Not surprisingly, some or many mental health experts come to feel like impostors, like frauds." (Psychiatry: The Science of Lies, Thomas Szasz, 2008 AD, p 109)
By Steve Rudd: Contact the author for comments, input or corrections.
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