[D66] Fwd: [Marxism] Thomas Szasz, R.I.P.

[Antid Oto]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/12/health/dr-thomas-szasz-psychiatrist-who-led-movement-against-his-field-dies-at-92.html?_r=1&hpw


September 11, 2012
Dr. Thomas Szasz, Psychiatrist Who Led Movement Against His Field, Dies 
at 92
By BENEDICT CAREY
Thomas Szasz, a psychiatrist whose 1961 book “The Myth of Mental 
Illness” questioned the legitimacy of his field and provided the 
intellectual grounding for generations of critics, patient advocates and 
antipsychiatry activists, making enemies of many fellow doctors, died 
Saturday at his home in Manlius, N.Y. He was 92.

He died after a fall, his daughter Dr. Margot Szasz Peters said.

Dr. Szasz (pronounced sahz) published his critique at a particularly 
vulnerable moment for psychiatry. With Freudian theorizing just 
beginning to fall out of favor, the field was trying to become more 
medically oriented and empirically based. Fresh from Freudian training 
himself, Dr. Szasz saw psychiatry’s medical foundation as shaky at best, 
and his book hammered away, placing the discipline “in the company of 
alchemy and astrology.”

The book became a sensation in mental health circles, as well as a bible 
for those who felt misused by the mental health system.

Dr. Szasz argued against coercive treatments, like involuntary 
confinement, and the use of psychiatric diagnoses in the courts, calling 
both practices unscientific and unethical. He was soon 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 biggest 
of the antipsychiatry intellectuals.”

“Together,” he added, “they tried their hardest to keep people away from 
psychiatric treatment on the grounds that if patients did not have 
actual brain disease, their only real difficulties were ‘problems in 
living.’ ”

This attack had some merit in the 1950s, Dr. Shorter said, but not later 
on, when the field began developing more scientific approaches.

To those skeptical of modern psychiatry, however, Dr. Szasz was a 
foundational figure.

“We did not agree on everything, like his view that there is no such 
thing as mental illness,” said Vera Hassner Sharav, president and 
founder of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, a patient 
advocacy group, and a longtime critic of the field. “But his message 
that people get designated as ill, labeled and then shafted out of 
society and preyed on by an industry dominated by drugs — that’s where 
he was very valuable.”

After making his name, Dr. Szasz only turned up the heat. From his base 
in the psychiatry department of 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) and “Psychiatric Slavery: When Confinement 
and Coercion Masquerade as Cure” (1977).

In 1969, in a move that damaged his credibility even among allies, he 
joined with the Church of Scientology to found the Citizens Commission 
on Human Rights, which portrays the field as abusive and regularly 
pickets psychiatric meetings.

Dr. Szasz was not a Scientologist himself, and he later distanced 
himself from the church, but he shared the religion’s critical view of 
psychiatry. His provocations were not without cost. In the 1960s, New 
York mental health officials, outraged at his attacks on the state 
system, blocked Dr. Szasz from teaching at a state hospital where 
residents trained, according to two former colleagues. Dr. Szasz 
bristled but had little recourse, and his teaching was curtailed.

Dr. Szasz opposed the American Psychiatric Association’s broadening of 
its diagnoses in its new manual.

“For the record, I will say that I admired him, even though I think he 
was dead wrong about the nature of schizophrenia,” said Dr. E. Fuller 
Torrey, founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center in Arlington, Va., 
which supports stronger laws to ensure treatment of people with severe 
mental disorders. “But he made a major contribution to the issue of the 
misuse of psychiatry. His message is important today.”

Thomas Stephen Szasz was born in Budapest on April 15, 1920, the second 
child of Julius Szasz, a lawyer, and the former Lily Wellisch. The 
family moved to Cincinnati in 1938, where the boy became a star student. 
He earned a degree in physics from the University of Cincinnati and 
graduated from the university’s medical school in 1944.

After an internship 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 faculty of SUNY Upstate.

He wife, Rosine, died in 1971. Beside his daughter Dr. Peters, he is 
survived by another daughter, Suzy Szasz Palmer; a brother, George; and 
a grandson.

Dr. Szasz was widely sought after as a speaker and presented with dozens 
of national and international awards. Until the end of his life he 
continued to discuss psychotherapy, the practice he was trained to 
perform and of which he became so skeptical.

“The goal is to assume more responsibility and therefore gain more 
liberty and more control over one’s own life,” he said of talk therapy 
in an interview in 2000 with the Web site Psychotherapy.net. “The issues 
or questions for the patient become to what extent is he willing to 
recognize his evasions of responsibility, often expressed as ‘symptoms.’ ”