Thomas Szasz Quotes

Thomas Stephen Szasz was a Hungarian-American academic, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He served for most of his career as professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York. A distinguished lifetime fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a life member of the American Psychoanalytic Association, he was best known as a social critic of the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry, as what he saw as the social control aims of medicine in modern society, as well as scientism. His books The Myth of Mental Illness and The Manufacture of Madness set out some of the arguments most associated with him.

Szasz argued throughout his career that mental illness is a metaphor for human problems in living, and that mental illnesses are not "illnesses" in the sense that physical illnesses are; and that except for a few identifiable brain diseases, there are "neither biological or chemical tests nor biopsy or necropsy findings for verifying DSM diagnoses."Szasz maintained throughout his career that he was not anti-psychiatry but was rather anti-coercive psychiatry. He was a staunch opponent of civil commitment and involuntary psychiatric treatment but believed in, and practiced, psychiatry and psychotherapy between consenting adults.

His views on special treatment followed from libertarian roots, based on the principles that each person has the right to bodily and mental self-ownership and the right to be free from violence from others, and he criticized the "Free World" as well as the communist states for their use of psychiatry. Wikipedia  

✵ 15. April 1920 – 8. September 2012  •  Other names Thomas Stephen Szasz
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Thomas Szasz: 70 quotes15 likes

Famous Thomas Szasz Quotes

“The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naïve forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.”

Thomas Szasz

&quot;Personal Conduct&quot; http://books.google.com/books?id=IYOcAQAAQBAJ&amp;q=%22The+stupid+neither+forgive+nor+forget+the+na%C3%AFve+forgive+and+forget+the+wise+forgive+but+do+not+forget%22&amp;pg=PA177#v=onepage, p. 51. http://openlibrary.org/works/OL15151528W/The_Second_Sin <br class="br">The Second Sin (1973)

“Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.”

Thomas Szasz

"Emotions", p. 36.
The Second Sin (1973)

“Two wrongs don't make a right, but they make a good excuse.”

Thomas Szasz

Source: The Second Sin (1973), P. 49.

Thomas Szasz Quotes about personality

Thomas Szasz: Trending quotes

“The homosexual is a scapegoat who evokes no sympathy. Hence, he can only be a victim, never a martyr.”

Thomas Szasz

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 169.

Thomas Szasz Quotes

“Prostitution is said to be the world’s oldest profession.”

Thomas Szasz

It is, indeed, a model of all professional work: the worker relinquishes control over himself … in exchange for money. Because of the passivity it entails, this is a difficult and, for many, a distasteful role.
Source: The Second Sin (1973), p. 45.

“It taught me, at an early age, that being wrong can be dangerous, but being right, when society regards the majority’s falsehood as truth, could be fatal.”

Thomas Szasz

Source: The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct

“The crime [homosexuality] was subject to punishment by both secular and ecclesiastical courts—just as now it is subject to punishment by both penal and psychiatric sanctions.”

Thomas Szasz

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 164.

“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

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 161.

“In the past, men created witches: now they create mental patients.”

Thomas Szasz

The Manufacture of Madness (1970) http://books.google.com/books?id=hpOcRRum3XEC&amp;pg=PR24&amp;q=&amp;quot;In+the+past+men+created+witches+now+they+create+mental+patients&amp;quot;.

“Over the past thirty years, we have replaced the medical-political persecution of illegal sex users ("perverts" and "psychopaths") with the even more ferocious medical-political persecution of illegal drug users.”

Thomas Szasz

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. xi.

“What had been drapetomania became depression. … Modern man runs away from a life that seems to him a kind of slavery.”

Thomas Szasz

"The Sane Slave: Social Control and Legal Psychiatry," American Criminal Law Review, vol. 10 (1971), p. 346.

“The “treatment” can have only one goal: to convert the heretic to the true faith, to transform the homosexual into a heterosexual.”

Thomas Szasz

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 172.

“The passion to interpret as madness that with which we disagree seems to have infected the best of contemporary minds.”

Thomas Szasz

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 203.

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