Psychiatry's gentleman abolitionist.

• Author: Baker, Robert A.

The history of man's unsuccessful and sorry efforts to deal with his mental problems is well documented but seldom read. Moreover, its message has never been accepted and acted upon. We have learned little from our misguided efforts in the name of healing, despite our vaunted scientific progress. The assumption that mental health is synonymous with physical health is a catastrophic mistake and a glaring failure to understand the basic nature of the human being. This erroneous assumption is the foundation and guiding principle of the pseudoscientific branch of modern medicine we call psychiatry.

To correct this error and to revolutionize completely the way that modern medicine regards and treats individuals whose behavior deviates from the norm has been the lifelong crusade of eighty-one-year-old psychiatrist Thomas Szasz. Throughout his brilliant and distinguished career and in the pages of some thirty books and hundreds of articles in scientific, medical, and popular journals, Szasz has waged an often solitary, unrelenting battle against medical misunderstanding, medical error, medical mistreatment, medical abuse, and medical injustice in the industry's dealings with people whose behavior is odd or deviant and who therefore are labeled mentally ill. According to Szasz, the very concept of "mental illness" is a colossal mistake and error of judgment.

Since the publication of his first scholarly article in 1947, Szasz has authored a steady stream of publications defending human freedom and individual liberty. He has offered principled opposition to all that infringes on the individual's right to medical self-determination.

His first book, Pain and Pleasure (1957), was a mild criticism of the psychiatric (medical) view that all pain has a physical origin and thus for which medication is the answer. His second book, The Myth of Mental Illness (1961), notified the medical world that he was a major intellectual force to be reckoned with. He shocked the psychiatric profession by arguing that in no way was "mental illness" akin to the disorders caused by bacteria or viruses. Labeling people as "mentally ill" freed them from personal responsibility for their actions, gave psychiatrists the power to commit people involuntarily to "mental hospitals," and promoted the erroneous view that diseases of the mind and diseases of the brain are identical. Almost all so-called mental disorders are emotional disorders--that is, disorders of thinking and behavior that cannot be likened to physical disorders, such as cancer and pneumonia. As psychiatric thinking maintained when The Myth of Mental Illness was published, so psychiatric thinking today continues to maintain that all "mental" disorders are "physical"; if no physical or neurological defect has been found to account for a disorder, eventually it will turn up. The quintessential example of this logical error is psychiatry's futile two-century search for the biological cause and physiological marker of "schizophrenia"--a category error analogous to attempting to photograph a dream.

Szasz has maintained from the outset that involuntary psychiatric commitment is worse than being sentenced to prison because ordinary prisoners are released after serving their time. Not so with mental hospital inmates. They are incarcerated at the discretion of psychiatrists, often for a lifetime and often because they are said to be...