Words to the Wise

A Medical-Philosophical Dictionary

Thomas Szasz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351471121
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

"The human mind abhors the absence of explanation, but full understanding is never possible. Human understanding is likely to be incomplete at best and, more often, utterly fallacious. To make matters worse, it is likely to be supported as truth and wisdom by religious and scientific authority, intellectual fashion and social convention. In Words to the Wise, Thomas Szasz offers a compendium of thoughts, observations, and aphorisms that address our understanding of a broad range of subjects, from birth to death.In this book, Szasz tackles a problem intrinsic to the human condition. What problem? In the words of the American humorist Josh Billings: ""The trouble with people is not what they don't know but that they know so much that ain't so."" Many of Thomas Szasz's books have been devoted to exposing what ""ain't so"" about mental illness and psychiatry. Here, Szasz applies the same skeptical spirit to the larger problem of people knowing much that ""ain't so."" About addiction, Szasz observes: ""If a person ingests a drug prohibited by legislators and claims that it makes him feel better, that proves he is an addict; if he ingests a drug prescribed by a psychiatrist and claims that it makes him feel better, that proves that mental illness is a biomedical disease."" About beauty: ""Beauty is in the eye of the beholder; ugliness is in the personality of the beholden."" About libertarians: ""Libertarians regard liberty as contingent on the right to property; scientists regard disease as contingent on pathological alteration of the body. All libertarians reject the notion of 'socialist liberty, ' yet many accept the notion of 'mental disease.'"" Or about power: ""Many of my critics say I am hostile to medicine and physicians. They are wrong. I am hostile only to the power of the medical profession and of physicians.""Szasz notes that despite enormous social pressure for a shared perspective on how the world works and how we ought to live, every person'saunde"

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Addiction

Giving oneself an addictive drug is a crime; receiving it from a government agent called an “addiction specialist” is a treatment.

* * *

If a person ingests a drug prohibited by legislators and claims that it makes him feel better, that proves that he is an addict.

If he ingests a drug prescribed by psychiatrists and claims that it makes him feel better, that proves that mental illness is a biomedical disease.

* * *

When Judaism in Spain was prohibited and Catholicism prescribed, many Jews became Catholics. This was called “religious conversion.”

Today, when heroin in the United States is prohibited and metha-done is prescribed, heroin addicts are often turned into methadone addicts. We call this “medical treatment.”

* * *

Actors and athletes, with superlative control over their bodies, are paraded as victims of an insidious illness—drug addiction—that robs them of their ability to control their craving for drugs. Most Americans prefer that illusion to the reality that such persons are guilty of the four deadly sins: lust, pride, gluttony, and greed.

* * *

“I regard relationship addiction as a definable, diagnosable and treatable disease process,” declares Robin Norwood, author of the 1985 best seller, Women Who Love Too Much.¹

The popular belief, validated by physicians and politicians, that drug addiction, alcohol addiction, gambling addiction, food addiction, shopping addiction, tobacco addiction, and sex addiction are diseases signifies that we are in the grips of a medical fundamentalism no less bizarre or extreme than the familiar religious fundamentalisms.

Adolescents

Adolescents are not full members of adult society. Hence, it is fallacious to speak of their “dropping out.”

Unless a young person exerts himself to become a part of society, he will, without any particular effort, find himself outside of it. That is the bitter lesson J. D. Salinger portrayed so perfectly in The Catcher in the Rye.

* * *

Puberty, a biological phenomenon, occurs when the organism has matured enough to procreate. In animals, this coincides with the female’s ability to care for its progeny. In humans, too, it coincided at one time, but it no longer does.

The more socially complex and technologically sophisticated society becomes, the wider grows the gap between the age at which its young members develop the biological capacity to procreate and at which they acquire the economic opportunity to act as adults. So long as society fails to take proper account of this fact, it will be plagued by a mounting burden of unwanted and unparented children growing up to be inadequate adults.

Today, teenage parents have the economic, legal, and social burdens of minors, and the responsibilities of adults. Many youngsters may be ready to take charge of their own lives long before they are given the opportunity to do so.

We ought to consider drastically shortening the period of compulsory education, allowing people to become full-fledged adults at a younger age, thus facilitating economic independence and its salutary existential side effects.

* * *

We expect adolescents to be capable of using computers and incapable of using drugs, and they often comply.

Advertising

Advertising creates private needs and promises to satisfy them with a product or service.

Demagoguery creates public needs and promises to satisfy them with a social policy or “program.”

Agreement

Life would be more harmonious if people were more interested in seeking mutual respect than mutual agreement.

Who needs agreement? The religious zealot, the fanatic nationalist, the doctrinaire professional.

Civilized man is satisfied with respect. His credo is: live and let live.

Alcoholism

Experts assert that the disposition to drink alcohol to excess, leading to “alcoholism,” is genetically determined. Once the “alcoholic” knows that, he becomes more, not less, responsible than the non-alcoholic for his drinking and its consequences.

Americans

Americans are the world’s most successful manufacturers of trade names, such as Coca Cola, Marlboro, and Prozac. They are also the world’s most avid consumers of social and political quackery, from Prohibition and Affirmative Action to the War on Drugs.

* * *

The American mall: a privately owned shopping and entertainment area where the best dressed people are the guards.

Antipsychiatry

Ronald D. Laing (1927-1989), the Scottish “antipsychiatrist,” is often believed to have rejected the concept of mental illness and opposed involuntary mental hospitalization and coercive psychiatric treatment. The opposite is the case.

Laing wrote:

1. “Our sanity is not ‘true’ sanity. Their madness is not ‘true’ madness.… True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality.”²
2. “When I certify someone insane, I am not equivocating when I write that he is of unsound mind, may be dangerous to himself and others, and requires care and attention in a mental hospital.”³
3. In 1976, Laing’s twenty-four-year-old daughter, Fiona, was rejected by her boyfriend. Laing biographer John Clay writes:

She had “cracked up,” and had been found weeping outside a church near the family home. [Committed to a local mental hospital, she is given ECT.] He [Adrian] rang his father up and asked him “in despair and anger” what he was going to do about it. Laing reassured him that he would visit Fiona and “do everything in his power” to ensure that she was not given ECT, but when it came to the crunch, as Adrian Laing relates, all he could say was “Well, Ruskin Place [the family home] or Gartnavel [the “state” mental hospital where Laing received his psychiatric training]—what’s the difference?”⁴

* * *

The self-stigmatizing label “antipsychiatry” was the joint product of Ronald D. Laing and David Cooper. In The Dialectics of Liberation, Cooper wrote: “The organizing group [of the “Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation,” held in London in 1967] consisted of four psychiatrists who…counter-label[ed] their discipline as anti-psychiatry. The four were Dr. R. D. Laing and myself, also Dr. Joseph Berke and Dr. Leon Redler.”⁵

Predictably, supporters of coercive psychiatry love to diagnose and dismiss their critics as “antipsychiatrists.”

* * *

Lavoisier didn’t call himself an “anti-phlogistonian.” He simply maintained that phlogiston was the name of an imaginary substance.

Einstein didn’t call himself an “anti-etherian.” He simply maintained that (the physicist’s) ether, like the chemist’s phlogiston, was also the name of an imaginary substance.

Luther and Calvin did not call themselves “anti-Christians.” They simply rejected the papacy’s claims to temporal power and its prevarications about indulgences.

* * *

Michel Foucault (1926-1984), the French psychologist-philosopher-“antipsychiatrist,” is also often credited with rejecting the concept of mental illness and opposing the practice of involuntary mental hospitalization. This, too, is inaccurate. Foucault wrote:

The structural description of mental illness, therefore, would have to analyze the positive and negative signs for each syndrome.… The science of mental pathology cannot but be the science of the sick personality.⁶

The only thing I can compare this experience to [being intoxicated with LSD] is sex with a stranger… Contact with a strange [male] body affords an experience of the truth similar to what I am experiencing now.⁷

Foucault objected to psychiatric imprisonment because it was imprisonment (in an “unjust” capitalist society), not because it was psychiatric. In the 1950s, Foucault was a member of the French Communist Party. Literary critic Roger Kimball aptly characterizes Foucault as a man who “never met a revolutionary piety he didn’t like. He championed various extreme forms of Marxism, including Maoism…[and] supported the Ayatollah Khomeini.”⁸

* * *

It would be nonsensical to call a physician critical of coercions in the name of dermatology an “anti-dermatologist,” or a physician critical of coercions in the name of oncology an “anti-oncologist.” The fact that it is not nonsensical to call a physician critical of coercions in the name of psychiatry an “antipsychiatrist” is evidence that psychiatry is about coercion, not healing.

* * *

In the 1970s, self-styled antipsychiatrists undermined the case against the existence of mental illness and the practice of psychiatric coercions-and-excuses by attributing mental diseases to an “insane society” and claiming success for “treating” such diseases with their particular brand of “therapy.”⁹

In the 1990s, self-styled critics of psychiatry undermined the case against the existence of mental illness and the practice of psychiatric coercions-and-excuses by dwelling on the harmfulness of drugging children with Ritalin or adults with Prozac; claiming successful “treatment” for these nonexistent diseases by their particular brand of “empathy and love”; blaming the use of psychiatric drugs on drug companies rather than on psychiatrists, patients, and the relatives of patients; and refusing to recognize that most adults who use psychiatric drugs do so voluntarily, indeed eagerly.¹⁰

Antipsychotic Drugs

Thomas Szasz (1956):

[Antipsychotic drugs] function as chemical straitjackets…. When patients had to be restrained by the use of [physical] force—for example, by a strait-jacket—it was difficult for those in charge of their care to convince themselves that they were acting altogether on behalf of the patient…. Restraint by chemical means does not make [others] feel guilty; herein lies the danger to the patient.¹¹

Artisanship and Artificiality

In the past, most people were engaged in making things others found useful, such as clothing and furniture. They could see and touch the products of their labors and took pride in their work.

Today,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Words to the Wise
• Notes
• Name Index
• Subject Index