"Szasz argues that the word schizophrenia does not stand for a genuine disease, that psychiatry has invented the concept as a sacred symbol to justify the practice of locking up people against their will and treating them with a variety of unwanted, unsolicited, and damaging interventions. . . . Szasz is an incisive, exciting, and dramatic writer. He loves the clever analogy, the well-turned phrase, the dramatic surprise."—George W. Albee, Contemporary Psychology
"Szasz is a valuable critic and agent provocateur. . . . Szasz has much to say which requires answering."—Anthony Storrs, Spectator
"Dr. Szasz mounts an incisive two-pronged assault on modern psychiatry and what he regards as its mirror-image, the ‘anti-psychiatry’ of R. D. Laing and his followers. . . . Timely and urgent reading."—Publishers Weekly
Description
Schizophrenia: The Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry examines the concept of schizophrenia and the origins of its classification as a disease. Szasz convincing argues that rather than a medical diagnosis, the word schizophrenia is a symbol employed by psychiatrists as a means of control.
Table of Contents
1. Psychiatry: The Model of the Syphilitic Mind
2. Anti-Psychiatry: The Model of the Plundered Mind
3. Schizophrenia: Psychiatric Syndrome or Scientific Scandal?
4. Psychiatry and Matrimony: Arrangements for Living
5. Madness, Misbehavior, Mental Illness: A Review and a Restatement
Epilogue - Schizophrenia: The Sacred Symbol
Appendix I - The View of Mental Illness as Brain Disease: A Chronology
Appendix II - Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry: The Superior Virtues of the Oppressor and the Oppressed
References
Index
About the Author
Thomas Szasz is the author of over four hundred articles and nineteen books; among the most recent are The
Therapeutic State: Psychiatry in the Mirror of Current Events and Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences. He was both a practicing psychiatrist and a professor of psychiatry at the Health Science Center, State University of New York, in Syracuse.
5.25 x 8, 256 pages
April 1988