Thomas Szasz and the Age of Psychiatrism
Raico, Ralph
Ralph Raico Thomas Szasz and the Age of Psychiattism • • Ours is the age of psychology and psychiatry, a Leaden Age. Above all in the United States, the fading away of the religious view of man,...
...A return to "Bedlam" will be imputed to us as our ultimate goal (but what we favor is simply freeing anyone who has not violated the rights of others...
...this, if only public opinion permitted its adoption, would be a "true kindness" to the patients, he said...
...Thus, Benjamin Rush, the great pioneer of American psychiatry (whose portrait adorns the seal of the American Psychiatric Association—quite rightly so, since he was basically a totalitarian of the first water) asserted after the American Revolution that: "The excess of the passion for liberty...
...Really, someone somewhere along the line should have tactfully clued Bieber in to the fact that orthodox Christianity, for some two thousand years now, has required "no operational sexuality" of everyone who is not married...
...And if the reader wishes to be freed from the spell of psychiatrism once and for all, he or she need only read Chapter 11 of Szasz's The Manufacture of Madness, on the mental illness invented by late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century psychiatry—"masturbatory insanity...
...psychiatric predictions are incredibly inaccurate...
...specialists without mind, sensualists without heart—and this nullity imagines that it is the culmination of human history...
...To the contrary, such predictions are wrong more often than they are right...
...Yet who, I wonder, made these MDs into judges over all those Christian saints, over all those Greek heroes...
...And this incredible program from G. Brock Chisholm, former head of the World Federation of Mental Health: "The reinterpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong...
...My thesis is that the development of the concept of mental illness is best understood as part of this change...
...Lawrence C. Kolb, recently appointed by Governor Carey to head the New York State Mental Hygiene services, has praised Soviet psychiatry for "the facility with which effective decisions and actions are made in regard to the economic, social, legal and vocational life of the patient...
...It is that we have to keep in step with the times...
...The only argument at all that can be gathered from the statement is that, since a "significant proportion" of homosexuals seem to be satisfied with their lifestyle, show no "signs" of any other kind of mental disturbance, and can "function quite effectively," therefore homosexuals should not be classified per se as mentally ill...
...For, to Institutional Psychiatry and the psychiatric mode (as well as, for instance, to Marxism) can be applied Camus' deep statement: "We are struggling against an idea whose victory would mean the end of the world...
...Institutional Psychiatry, as contrasted with the voluntary sort, also enjoys certain...
...Soviet psychiatry is, of course, purely and simply Institutional Psychiatry, and, just as it is no accident that State ownership of the means of communication in the USSR has led to total State control, so a system of completely State-financed psychiatry has led logically to the consequences of which everyone is by now aware...
...With the other human sciences, psychiatry must now decide what is to be the immediate future of the human race...
...In fact, psychiatrists can predict "dangerousness" much less accurately than can cops...
...The first is a very minor part of what has historically passed for psychiatry: it is Contractual, or Voluntary, Psychiatry, the unique relationship invented by Freud and his followers, whereby a "patient" (the term "client" would be preferred by many nowadays) seeks out, of his own volition, a person thought to be skilled at discussing the kinds of problems the patient faces, enters into an agreement to purchase his services, and regularly pays him...
...In an article in the California Law Review (1974), "Psychiatry and the Presumption of Expertise: Flipping Coins in the Courtroom," Bruce J. Ennis and Thomas R. Litwack carefully examine the by now extensive evidence as to the reliability of psychiatric judgments...
...For libertarians and anyone else friendly to freedom and the inborn dignity of each of us, there is only one option: to begin at once the phasing out of all government funding for psychiatric The Alternative: An American Spectator May 1976 19 purposes (senile people and those who would prefer to remain in an artificially protective environment for a while could be housed in hostels...
...Freud thought that the practitioner should be a doctor of medicine, but, as Szasz points out, this is clearly a residue of nineteenth-century positivism in his thought: there is no reason to think that what is supposed to occur—namely, talk about life-problems—can be better carried on with an MD than with an intelligent and experienced layman with certain character traits...
...In the case of research into and the carrying out of "behavior modification," the elimination of funding—in this question everything depends on the material base—should be complete and immediate...
...Himself a psychiatrist (but, as we shall see, distinctions must be drawn), Szasz has devoted himself, ever since the publication, some fifteen years ago, of his The Myth of Mental Illness, to combating the systematic dehumanization of life and the grab for limitless power that psychiatrism represents...
...Now, it is to be expected that, threatened in its very existence, the beast will turn surprisingly ugly, snarl, and try to bite back...
...from the National Advertising Council's "public service" TV ads impressing on us that every manner of bad habit is really a "disease," to the infiltration into the school system of behavior-modification drugs and courses in mental and sexual "healthiness...
...Irving Bieber, published in the New York Times, Spitzer is even more explicit (in reading what follows, try to imagine a real scientist, say a physicist or biochemist, setting forth something similar as the grounds—or any grounds at all!—for revising a theory in his field): "And the reason that this new proposal was unanimously passed by the three committees of the APA and finally by the Board of Trustees is not that the American Psychiatric Association has been taken over by some wild revolutionaries or latent homosexuals...
...Can he really mean to say that the millions of Christians who have adhered through the centuries to this rule were "mentally ill" ? One does not know whether to laugh or cry: men such as this have set themselves up as the arbiters of right and wrong—homosexuality is bad, no, good, no, still bad...
...The cornerstone of Szasz's comprehensive and devastating argument against psychiatrism is his distinction between two utterly opposed social phenomena, both of which go by the name of "psychiatry" and "psychotherapy...
...An examination of the rationale furnished for this action gives us, I think, an incomparable insight into the true nature of psychiatry's "conceptual structure...
...There will be screams at theharm being inflicted on the poor "mentally ill," who will now lack "treatment" and loving care...
...The relationship is terminable at the will of the patient, and its structure is such that the patient is always ultimately in control...
...Another mental illness which Rush "discovered" was "Derangement in the Principle of Faith, or the Believing Faculty," an instance of which dread disease was "persons who refuse to admit human testimony in favour of the truths of the Christian religion...
...His reply is a treasure: "In individuals who have no operational sexuality, apart from those in certain professions, like the clergy, where it is demanded...
...This is occurring now, in America...
...As Szasz says: "The metamorphosis of the medieval into the modern mind entailed a vast ideological conversion from the perspective of theology to that of science...
...crime is a disturbance of communication, hence a form of mental illness...
...What the positivist philosopher Auguste Comte called the "theological" and the "metaphysical" stages are pow behind us, and—true to his schema—they have been replaced by the `p4sitive" stage...
...On the face of it, the situation is incomprehensible, given the meagerness of the actual "achievements" of psychology and psychiatry...
...Interestingly, Dr...
...But the circumstance that their supposed "science" happens not to exist fazes establishment psychiatrists le moins du monde, and their imperialistic claims have come to rival those of Boni-face VIII and the Unam Sanctam...
...In his statement, he asserts that declassification "will thus help answer the charge of some members of our own profession, who claim that mental illness is a myth and that by labelling individuals we are simply acting as agents of social control...
...his often ludicrous theories, or the authoritarianism implicit in his personal view of the therapist as definer of the problems and knower of the psyche of the "patient," that constitutes his great achievement...
...advantages: it disposes of the police power, and may and characteristically does compel people to undergo treatment...
...Psychiatry, which once was regarded in the vanguard of the movement to liberate people from their troubles, is now viewed by many, and with some justification, as being an agent of social control" (emphasis added...
...Yes, I would...
...Its motive was purely and simply political, and Spitzer admits as much...
...generally, by the State...
...One major move in the grand strategy has been to attempt to define all crime as "mental illness...
...Here the reader will find the founders of American, French, and British psychiatry—not only Rush, but Esquirol, Maudsley, and others—promoting this almost incredible fraud, whereby masturbation was a major cause, as well as symptom, of insanity...
...No operational sexuality—I believe that used to be called "chastity...
...psychiatric judgments are not only unreliable with respect to the ultimate diagnosis, but lack consistency even in the perception of the presence, nature and severity of symptoms...
...The chapter has to be read to be believed —little girls who masturbated "excessively" were forced to undergo clitoridectomies, and, in 1891, the president of the Royal College of Surgeons, James Hutchinson, sent up a trial balloon for the castration of little boys with the same habit (note the sexism involved in the differential treatment...
...Actually, scientific reasoning had nothing whatsoever to do with the change of policy...
...the satisfaction of knowing—as he explicitly states in his most recent book, Ceremonial Chemistry—that he regards himself as a libertarian...
...In a debate with lifelong queer-hunter Dr...
...Above all in the United States, the fading away of the religious view of man, and even of the great, not directly religiously-based humanist tradition that for thousands of years maintained that man is something unique for man, has left a gaping void, increasingly filled by what purports to be "science...
...In particular, the notion of "mental illness" has played the role of stigmatizing and invalidating those who were in one way or another out of step with socially and governmentally sanctioned modes of conduct...
...and the methods it is permitted to employ—by no means rarely —include electroshock, surgical destruction of parts of the brain, and the forcible administration of drugs such as anectine (which causes experiences similar to dying by suffocation...
...there exists no behavioral science incorporating empirically supported propositions that are not trivial and that apply to human affairs...
...It must have been people like Bieber, Spitzer, and their colleagues whom Max Weber had in mind when he described the positivist social engineers of the future, for the description is perfect: carriers of "mechanized petrifaction, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance...
...But although this sort of psychiatry still exists to a certain extent in the United States and some other Western countries, the great bulk of psychiatry has been and 18 The Alternative: An American Spectator May 1976 continues to be of an entirely different nature, what Szasz calls Institutional Psychiatry...
...chastity is definitely bad...
...From Psychology Today, with all its silly, slick pretensions (brilliantly satirized a couple of years ago in the National Lampoon), to the pocket magazine at the supermarket checkout counter urging us to "test" our this and that...
...No one else can...
...Philip Q. Roche, an expert in the relationship of law and psychiatry, tells us: "All felons are mental cases...
...In this way, it was a mere translation into more acceptable "modern" terms of the earlier ideas of "sin" and "heresy," and may be viewed as their positivist analogue...
...But at least we can try to understand and evaluate what is going on...
...Szasz demonstrates that, from its beginnings, government-funded and -sponsored psychiatry has functioned as an enforcer of the existing order...
...It turns out that the factor which may best account for the diagnosis is "the clinician's own personality, value system, self-image, personal preferences, and attitudes...
...Szasz's work has earned him the admiration of thoughtful persons in all political camps (his articles have appeared, for example, in both National Review and the New Republic), but we have...
...And this is the prime responsibility of psychiatry...
...these are some of their conclusions: "The chancesof a second psychiatrist agreeing with the diagnosis of a first psychiatrist 'are barely better than 50-50...
...This whole bizarre and frightening social phenomenon Thomas Szasz terms "psychiatrism," and in his numerousbooks and articles (he is, happily, an inexhaustible worker), he has, in my view, provided us with a complete anatomy of its theory, sociology, and practice...
...What he is referring to is called, by mature people, living life...
...But, gradually, as society relented and masturbation became a socially more accepted practice, "masturbatory insanity" was undiscovered by psychiatrists...
...The central and astounding fact is that, in the statement presented by Dr...
...As it happens, we ourselves have been witnesses to a very similar case of undiscovery, , greatly reinforcing Szasz's argument...
...20 The Alternative: An American Spectator May 1976...
...Here, the individual is "treated" by a psychiatrist (or something similar) who is paid by someone else...
...are belated objectives of practically all effective psychotherapy...
...Bieber, who throughout is nervously aware that here politics is the name of the game, and who keeps sputtering that he is a "scientist," is challenged as to whether he would consider "asexuality" or celibacy to be a mental disorder...
...And, although about fifty thousand persons a year are subjected to "preventive detention," mostly on the judgment of psychiatrists, because they are "dangerous," "there is literally no evidence that psychiatrists reliably and accurately predict dangerous behavior...
...What Noam Chomsky asserted in regard to Skinner's wild claims may be said of the two fields in general: "At the moment we have virtually no scientific evidence and not even the germs of an interesting hypothesis about how human behavior is determined...
...David Reuben—our entire culture is by now drenched in the grotesque vocabulary and unnatural ways of thinking invented by a succession of MDs who mostly had a not very profound interest in what makes people tick...
...Another gambit has been to make "mental illness" coextensive with all life-problems, emotional stresses, and, indeed, anything less than tip-top "functioning...
...We will be accused of meanly preferring our own economic well-being to the "cure" of these unfortunates—this from the dear little saints who have 'been converting a vague public guilt into country homes and investing the rest for years...
...for, after all—who defines what a felony is...
...For instance, in the view of Karl Menninger, perhaps the most famous psychiatrist in the country: "All people have mental illness of different degrees at different times, and sometimes some are much worse, or better...
...As a last resort, our own "mental health" will be impugned—but we know now that this is a spiggot they open and close at will, and I guess we will be able to live with their innuendoes...
...Since the real meaning of certain modern movements and ideas can often by seen more clearly in their earlier formulations—because they were more naively stated, or simply because the lapse of time brings a certain cultural distance—m,ny of Szasz's best illustrations of this truth about Institutional Psychiatry can be found in examples from its founders...
...constitutes a form of insanity, which I shall take the liberty of distinguishing by the name of anarchia...
...Szasz has analyzed this brilliantly in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, a very important book, I believe, for anyone considering entering therapy...
...Really, what could be going on in the mind of a man like this...
...The harm is irreversible, and things are likely to get much worse...
...In New York State, starting under Rockefeller, taxpayers have come to pay one billion dollars a year for "mental hygiene...
...This is a beautiful example of psychiatrists placing themselves at the disposal of whatever State happens to pay them...
...More and more, people semi to regard themselves and others not as persons, with all that that fateful categori.entails, but as instantiations of general laws of "human behavior" ; and they look to the alleged "sciences" of psychology and psychiatry to furnish "explanations" of themselves, of those they come across, and—it is a pity to have to say it—even of their lovers and friends...
...from Ann Landers ("Run, kiddo, don't walk, to the nearest counselor"), down to that smiling hustler, Dr...
...The single most important characteristic of psychotherapy is that the client can rely upon the absolute confidentiality of the sessions, and it was Freud's stress on this social relationship, rather than his questionable methodology (dream-analysis, etc...
...On December 15, 1973, the Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association, speaking in the name of the Association, unanimously voted to alter a position it had held for almost a century, and decided that homosexuality was not, after all, a mental disorder...
...Robert L. Spitzer, spokesman for the APA, there is not the meagerest reference to any recent "scientific" findings or new "data" which might have led the psychiatrists to revise their traditional view of homosexuality...
Vol. 9 • May 1976 • No. 8
