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 Psychiatric Slavery Is a Fatal Flaw in the American Ideal
NEW ON AMAZON!
by Thomas S. Szasz

      These are the books that

kick-started the libertarian
movement after WWII.

I n the Age of Faith, the Church, viewed as having been

established by Christ, was perceived as a perfect society. Hence,
it was reasonable that it be empowered to make laws and inflict
penalties for their violation, which were viewed as striking at her
very life, the unity of belief. The result was the concept and crime of
“heresy”—an offense that vanishes when religious tolerance replaces
religious fundamentalism. “It does me no injury for my neighbor to
say there are twenty gods, or no God,” said Jefferson.

I say it does me no injury for my neighbor to say he is Napoleon or

that God is talking to him. That is psychiatric heresy. Everyone
knows that individuals who display such behavior are severely
mentally ill, suffering from “delusions.” True, such persons make
assertions that we regard as untrue. But why should that be a reason
for depriving them of liberty and “treating” them for diseases they GET IT FOR KINDLE
claim they do not have?

Psychiatric intolerance is one of the pillars of the therapeutic state.

Its trinity—psychiatric diagnosis, psychiatric treatment, and
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psychiatric incarceration—is a mask for justifying coercion as care.
Rejecting psychiatric treatment and rejecting life—by attempting
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 suicide—are psychiatric heresies, punishable by psychiatric
incarceration and involuntary psychiatric treatment. Opposition to
coercive psychiatric suicide prevention is reflexively dismissed as so
lacking in compassion as to be unworthy of consideration.

The repentant Catholic heretic often embraced the faith more

ardently than his persecutor, if for no other reason than to
demonstrate his reliability and insure his own safety. The repentant Economics in One Day
psychiatric heretic does the same. Commenting on the Surgeon
General’s declaration of war on mental illness, Kay Redfield Learn about scarcity, prosperity,
values, cooperation, character,
Jamison, professor of psychiatry at John Hopkins Medical School,
markets, spontaneous order, and
declares: “As someone who studies, treats and suffers from a severe
entrepreneurship. You'll see the
mental illness—manic depression—I commend the surgeon general
profound effect of free markets on
for his excellent, thoughtful and fair report on mental illness.” Not our standard of living across the
satisfied with embracing involuntary mental hospitalization and globe and over hundreds of years.
involuntary electric shock treatment for herself, Jamison advocates
imposing psychiatric coercions on others, and asserts that “the
distinction between voluntary and involuntary commitment is FREE COURSE
misleading and arbitrary.”

Psychiatric slavery—that is, confining individuals in madhouses—

began in the seventeenth century, grew in the eighteenth, and
became an accepted social custom in the nineteenth century.
Because the practice entails depriving law-abiding individuals of
liberty, it requires moral and legal justification. The history of Follow FEE on
psychiatry, especially its relation to law, is largely the story of the Flipboard
mutating justifications for psychiatric incarceration. The
metamorphosis of one criterion for commitment into another is
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 typically called “psychiatric reform.” It is nothing of the kind. The Flipboard Articles
bottom line of the psychiatric balance sheet is fixed: Individuals
deemed insane are stigmatized, incarcerated, and forcibly “treated.”
For more than 40 years I have maintained that psychiatric reforms
are exercises in prettifying plantations. Slavery cannot be reformed;
it can only be abolished.

Like the inquisitor, the contemporary psychiatrist has a hard time Follow FEE on Medium
distinguishing between repudiating the Other’s (false) ideas, which
he calls “delusions,” but tolerating him, and persecuting the Other to
help him see the “truth,” which he calls “treatment.” In the zealot’s
eyes, tolerance of psychiatric heresy is tantamount to a declaration Medium Articles
of war on psychiatry. Why? Because, unlike standard medical
practice, which rests on cooperation, standard psychiatric practice Advertisement
rests on coercion. This is what makes opposition to psychiatric
coercion seem to be the same as opposition to psychiatry in toto.

Tolerating Falsehood, Punishing Crime Support

Foundation for
Psychiatric slavery is the oldest and most characteristic feature of Economic Education.
the therapeutic state, which, in turn, is the modern, secular When you shop at smile.amazon.com,
incarnation of the theocratic state. Each is a species of political Amazon donates.
absolutism, one based on the pharmacratic rights of medical
protectors, the other on the divine rights of royal protectors. Since its
inception, the power and prestige of psychiatric slavery have steadily
grown and the coercive psychiatric system is now an integral and
respected part of every modern society. Why, then, do I oppose it?
Because I believe that the coercive control of bad behavior ought to
be a moral and political, not a medical or therapeutic, function; and
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 that the state ought to punish only illegal behavior and ought to do so
only by criminal sanctions. In short, I oppose psychiatric slavery
because I believe it is inimical to individual liberty and responsibility,
to the rule of law, and to the very existence of a free society.

However, most people see psychiatry not as enslavement to a

destructive ideology, but as liberation from a dangerous illness. This
is a recent development, due in large part to psychiatrists’ wisely
emphasizing diagnosis and prescribing medication—rather than
relying on mass incarceration of deviants in madhouses—which
makes them look like real doctors, who tend to be perceived as
benevolent. Accordingly, most people accept the claims that
psychiatry is a medical science and that psychiatric interventions are
medical treatments for real diseases, and fail to see that the lot of
psychiatric slaves is as miserable as ever.

Near-unanimous support for psychiatric slavery by public policy and

public opinion deprives the critic of a forum for effective dissent,
regardless of the absurdity of the psychiatric claim he criticizes. The
medical patient has a right to reject treatment; the mental patient
does not. This is how Stephen Rachlin, professor of psychiatry at
Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, justifies
this limitation: “It is axiomatic in medicine that the patient is hardly in
the best position to prescribe his own treatment.” Rachlin equates
the medical patient’s right to reject treatment prescribed for him by a
physician, with his “right” to dictate the treatment the physician
should provide for him. This, of course, is patent nonsense and has
nothing to do with the legal rule limiting physicians to treating only
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 those persons who agree to their treatment. In medicine, involuntary
treatment is assault and battery. In psychiatry, involuntary treatment
is the basic model and is viewed as “beneficence.” Rachlin’s
distortion enables him to say: “In my experience, the psychiatric
inpatient refusing treatment does so for reasons related to his
psychosis and thought disorder. . . . [I]f freedom is to be more than
just another word, the right to refuse treatment is one right too
many.”

Chattel slavery was the original sin of the American ideal of

individual liberty, a sin the nation has still been unable fully to
expiate. Psychiatric slavery is its Achilles’ heel, a fatal flaw that may
yet transform the American dream into an American nightmare.

Thomas S. Szasz

D r. Thomas Szasz (1920-2012) was a

Psychiatrist, academic, and champion of
individual rights. He devoted much of his life to campaigning against
many aspects of conventional psychiatry, in particular involuntary
psychiatric treatment and commitment.

     
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