Argues that psychiatry is a form of social control, challenging the traditional view of mental illness as a medical condition and exploring the social uses of mental health practices, particularly their impact on liberty and legal frameworks.

"Dr. Thomas Szasz shows how the medicine administered in psychiatric institutions is a sort of punishment. . . . [He] declares psychiatry to be a new form of social engineering—gravely dangerous where coercive. . . . This bold and iconoclastic work takes up most of the faults committed in the name of mental illness, and lays down short-run and long-run solutions."—New York Times Book Review

"Dr. Szasz makes a real contribution by alerting us to the abuses—existing and potential-of human rights inherent in enlightened mental health programs and procedures. He points out, with telling examples, shortcomings in commitment procedures, inadequacies in the protections afforded patients in mental institutions and the dangers of over-reliance on psychiatric expert opinion by judges and juries."—Arthur J. Goldberg, former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, American Bar Association Journal

Table of Contents

Preface
Preface to the First Edition
Introduction

PART ONE: Psychiatry as a Science
1. What Is Mental Illness?
2. Mental Illness: Disease or Derogation?
3. Classification in Psychiatry

PART TWO: Psychiatry as a Social Institution
4. Commitment of the Mentally Ill
5. False Commitment
6. Testamentary Capacity
7. Psychiatric Power and Social Action

PART THREE: Psychiatry and the Criminal Law
8. Crime and Mental Illness: A Critical Survey of the Literature
9. Crime and Punishment: A Game-Model Analysis of Forensic Psychiatry
10. Criminal Responsibility
11. Acquittal by Reason of Insanity

PART FOUR: Psychiatry and Constitutional Right
12. The Mental Patient's Position in Society: From Contract to Status
13. The Right to Trial
14. The Hospitalized Mental Patient's Fight for Freedom
15. The Abridgment of the Constitutional Rights of the Mentally Ill

PART FIVE: Psychiatry and Public Policy
16. Ethics and Psychiatry: The Case of Mrs. Isola Ware Curry 1
17. Politics and Psychiatry: The Case of Mr. Ezra Pound
18. Toward the Therapeutic State
19. Proposals for Reform in the Mental Health Field

Summary and Conclusions 237
Epilogue 2.54
Bibliography 256
lndex

About the Author

Thomas Szasz is professor emeritus of psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York. His books include Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry, The Manufacture of Madness, Ideology and Insanity, Ceremonial Chemistry, The Myth of Psychotherapy, Psychiatry: The Science of Lies, and The Medicalization of Everyday Life, all published by Syracuse University Press.

5.5 x 8.5, 304 pages

October 1989