Thomas Szasz on Psychiatry

[youtube:Qj7GmeSAxXo] 

Do you think he's out of his mind or does he make some very good points? I tend to agree with him.

"Labling a child as mentally ill, is stigmatization, not dianosis."

Labling people is sucky, so I enjoyed the doctor.

I had to withdraw my son from school because they wanted to send him to a shrink, and it's slavery, etc. He was just dancing in line and singing, and defending the meek, he's big, with a big heart. 

Everybody can be defined as anti-social in some way or another. If one does not admit to being an individual, he enslaves himself to morons.

cool videos!!!  

His premise that behaviors are not diseases makes perfect sense. In the absence of any objective medical evidence, much of contemporary psychiatric diagnosis, particularly as it relates to children, is kind of half-baked at best. Especially in the case of "recently discovered" (or invented out of thin air, in my view) things such as ADD. It seems like an excuse to put people on drugs and through theraputic programs. I'm willing to grant that a certain number of diseases of the brain have been discovered (ones that constitute an actual malfunction of the brain), but a lot of the ones that have popped up only in recent years warrant severe doubt.

 Some will try to enforce upon folks that, if they be deemed nutty, than they are a threat to others.

I want to reply unless they go around makin' threats, don't worry. I don't know if society can even prevent any crime. I think most criminals think they can get away with it, or go as far as, if not than - perished I will be. 

I feel some of these supposed doctors actually think they are in aid.

What a joke that - it must be the societies fault that people go and ball up. 

 

Well part of the problem is that mere eccentricity or behaviors outside of "the norm" are erroneously equated to mental illness. If your child is eccentric, they may very well be a genius, not a sociopath. What some psychiatrists are labeling as a "mental handicap" may actually be a blessing. I just don't trust the shrinks. I never have. Too many of them are taking advantage of their position as a means to control others and keep the medical-industrial-complex charade going.

I don't know much about Szasz or psychiatry. From what I have heard I'd tend to agree with him. Apparently a book is available on amazon in which he confronts his critics.

I'm with you Brainpolice. The idea of an illness which is physically undefinable is not a disease. I think it mental illness has come out of biological determinist thinking, denying free will, which removes the responsibility from ones actions. I too believe "mental illness" is also you used to drug up people you don't like and potentially to your political enemies. I wait for the day that Anarchists, or even small government types, are sectioned because they are mentally ill and need therefore to do more drugs than Lemmy from Motorhead.

Ha. Nothing Lemmy does will ever remote that giant wart from his face. It's his trademark.

Great video. You may found interesting this  aritcle of Bryan Kaplan, where he's trying  top look at Szaszian arguments with an "economist's eyes" :

http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/szaszrev.doc 

 I did.

 Heh, I replied to the other thread without noticing this one. You should read the Myth of Mental Ilness. If you're short on time you can read some of his shorter work on http://www.szasz.com/. 

If you're too short on time to go there, his argument is extremely basic and extremely logical. To accurately define a disease, you need to be able to prove empirically that a specific bodily lesion is causing the ailment. That's it. Psychiatry prefers to assert the existence of illnesses and then theorize on what causes them, and then theorize cures for these theoretical diseases that are completely imagined.

He objects to the idea that "Mental Illness" is a seperate category of disease with different standards of diagnosis.

 I don't know how convinced I am that no mental diseases exist, but at the same time I think the science has pretty well established that certain brain functions do in fact cause people to act in certain ways.

 No, it is not a blanket statement that brain-affecting diseases don't exist - just look at a disease like syphillus. Read the book, the science isn't well established at all. 

Abberant behavior is the result of acting on unusual subjective preferences, and cannot be caused by a brain abnormality.

For example, if a person lies about in a coma, they are just being extremely lazy and on a hunger strike, not really mentally diseased.

Or if a child is faliling their limbs violently, they must be having a temper tantrum, not having a seizure.

Also, psychotherapy and psychiatric drugs can't possibly have an effect on behavior. Only human willpower can decide behavior.

Sorry for the sarcasm, but I think the brain is a complex and poorly understood organ, it can certainly be diseased and cause behaviorial problems, and diagnosing it or treating it with psychiatric/psychological means should be an available choice to the public. I have doubts that more objective things like blood tests and MRI's can pinpoint problems in the brain in a cost effective way, if at all.

I think Szasz is just making fun of the fact that psychology is not a hard science. I think this fact is true, but irrelevant. We can't deterministically calculate what a given person will due based on the objective state of their brain. It's just like how praxeology is not a hard science, and an omiscient being who could calculate simulations of human thought might be able to dispense with it. But praxeology is the best foundation from a practical point of view, as Mises explains in Human Action.

It's easy to make statements like that if you never actually bother reading the material. Please at least attempt to back up your wildly inaccurate characterizations with citations. 

J.C. Hewitt:

 Heh, I replied to the other thread without noticing this one. You should read the Myth of Mental Ilness. If you're short on time you can read some of his shorter work on http://www.szasz.com/. 

If you're too short on time to go there, his argument is extremely basic and extremely logical. To accurately define a disease, you need to be able to prove empirically that a specific bodily lesion is causing the ailment. That's it. Psychiatry prefers to assert the existence of illnesses and then theorize on what causes them, and then theorize cures for these theoretical diseases that are completely imagined.

He objects to the idea that "Mental Illness" is a seperate category of disease with different standards of diagnosis.

Right, this explaination makes perfect sense to me. As you clarify above, it is not the claim that brain diseases don't exist, it's the claim that the bulk of contemporary psychiatric diagnosis do not constitute brain diseases and therefore are imaginary diseases made up to explain away undesired behaviors and put people on drugs.

 Let's not forget that these people are also empowered to incarcerate people for exhibiting aberrant behavior.

 My own mother had me kidnapped when I was 15 to be sent to what was essentailly a re-education camp. I managed to get out after three days thanks to a frenzied one-man letter-writing campaign. It's enormously easy to deprive someone of their freedom using the medical-industrial complex. No one even bothered to evaluate me - two big men woke me up one morning and forced me onto a plane. 

J.C. Hewitt:

It's easy to make statements like that if you never actually bother reading the material. Please at least attempt to back up your wildly inaccurate characterizations with citations. 

 

But what about...

 

J.C. Hewitt:

No, read the book.

 

But what if...

 

J.C. Hewitt:

NO! JUST READ THE BOOK!

 

Oh... OK.  

 Argue from the text and then I will be happy to respond in depth. I'm not going to waste my time knocking down straw men.

See here for an incredibly perverse result of "psychiatry". 

A man jumps off a of a fourth floor balcony with his two kids; one dies and the other survives. He gets of with murder because he is "incapable". 

>Argue from the text and then I will be happy to respond in depth. I'm not going to waste my time knocking down straw men.

Wow, I must have struck a nerve.

>See here for an incredibly perverse result of "psychiatry".
>man jumps off a of a fourth floor balcony with his two kids; one dies and the other survives. He gets of with murder because he is "incapable".

 What's perverse? That a mentally ill person is going to receive treatment, rather than punishment?

Oops, I forgot. Mental illnesses don't appear on X-rays, and thus can't possibly exist.

>He objects to the idea that "Mental Illness" is a seperate category of disease with different standards of diagnosis.

Yeah, why should mental illness be any more difficult to diagnose than any other disease?

Heart - pumps blood

Lung - absorbs oxygen

Brain -  responsible for thought, memory, perception, emotion, speech, motor control, logic, planning, behavior, etc.

 >To accurately define a disease, you need to be able to prove empirically that a specific bodily lesion is causing the ailment. 

That's a perfectly acceptable definition of disease. Perhaps, in cases of profound mental illness where no lesions are present we shall call them "uneases".

Is vitamin deficiency, e.g. beriberi, a disease? Or do you need lesions to form first before getting diagnosed?

 

Wow, I must have struck a nerve.

Verily thou hast wounded me. Zounds!

Don't be afraid of engaging the text. Szasz addresses all of these issues point-by-point. If you're not willing to do any reading, I'm not going to bother refuting you.

At least trolls like Nathyn are industrious enough to cherry-pick quotes. You're just lazy. 

as a future clinical psychologist, I must say he's right on the money.

 

mental illness is a grave misnomer. 

I did read some of his drivel at the website and, the more I read, the more inane and/or irrelevant it all seems. The only part of the site I liked reading is http://www.szasz.com/critics.htm

Here are a few quotes from Szasz.

"There was no evidence for a humoral imbalance causing illness, but the doctrine prevailed for two thousand years."

Here he spends a lot of time harping on certain antiquated nonsense (humoral imbalance), as if psychiatry is the only area where nonsense has appeared. For example, in science, we had the flat earth, phlogiston and epicycles. Of course all this harping would be relevant if only it weren't for the fact that psychiatry can evolve with time.

"There is no evidence for a chemical imbalance causing mental illness, but that does not impair the doctrine's scientific standing or popularity."

This is surely untrue because administering a chemical imbalance (i.e. drugging someone) can alter their behavior and produce effects such as seizures and hallucinations. 

"Neither the American Psychiatric Association nor American presidents remind people of the caveat of the great nineteenth-century English neurologist, John Hughlings Jackson (1835-1911): "Our concern as medical men is with the body. If there be such a thing as disease of the mind, we can do nothing for it.""

This glib quote is easily defused. Perhaps Szasz would be placated if we just called it brainal disease instead of mental disease.

Here's a connundrum for you. A blow to the head can leave no detectable lesions and yet can trigger a seizure. Is the seizure behavior due to brain injury or praxeology?

Baxter, if we called it a brainial disease it would be treated by neurologists. The idea that psychiatric disorders are brain disorders is contradictory - if it is true, then it's clear that psychiatry should not exist. There are not 2 specialities treating the stomach in entirely different ways. The clear fact, from the history of psychiatry, and from the practice of psychiatry, is that no one ever thinks mental disease is brain disease, until someone challenges them to clarify just what mental disease is. Some brain disorders used to be considered mental disorders, such as epilepsy. Epilepsy is no longer treated by psychiatrists, precisely because it was discovered to be a brain disease, and hence treated by neurologists. What is mental disease then? The history is that psychiatry grew out of the state, and originally served as a legal concept, as it still does. Mental disease is an excuse to jail innocent people, or free guilty people. Only recently have people who are not locked up sought to escape responsibility by having themselves classified as mentally ill.

I use to respect this guy a lot but its been waning ever since I found out he belongs to the CCHR. I can't take scientologists seriously...

 

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Commission_on_Human_Rights

I think 'disease' and 'illness' are not the best words, but I don't see the harm in defining types of behavior or states of mind.  And if one wants, he should be free to alter his state of mind.

Forced drugging is, of course, much of the problem.  Locking people up for behavior that harms no one else is also wrong.  One thing that really bothers me is the idea of someone being unfit to stand trial.  A person can be locked up and accused of a crime but never given a trial if he is ruled 'unfit'.

 

 

The heart of the matter is that some people are locked up without breaking the law. The language used today is, 'a danger to himself or to others'. It is a human right that we have access to a fair trial when arrested. The state may not prosecute you for a crime it cannot prove you committed. There has to be an overt act. This stands to reason because someone can change his mind about committing a crime at the last minute. And if you believe it is the state's job to protect you from yourself, we should go back to 19th century classical liberal roots which say each person has the right to bodily and mental self ownership and the right to be free from violence from others. This implies taking responsibility for ones own actions. It is not the state's job to 'protect' you from yourself.

As Szasz correctly points out, psychiatry is an arm of the law and is the most egregious offender of libertarian principles. It cannot even exist as a medical specialty without the use of force. That is no overstatement. That is not to say some people have not been helped in some way during a consultation with a psychiatrist. No, on the contrary, all it takes many times for an idividual to feel some relief from his troubles is to talk to another human being... especially when that other human being does not try to evaluate for the person looking for help. But this practice of talking and listening is not unique to psychiatry. The field of therapy is wide open for people to find help which works for them. So removing coersion from psychiatry would make psychiatry no different from many other professions involving talking and listening. But at the same time, without the phony premise upon which the use of force or the threat of the use of force is based(think DSM, psychiatry's bible), it would be impossible to justify all the state funding which props the profession up.

What many, if not most, libertarians appear to be unaware of is that the DSM does not contain a single entry which has not been voted into existence as a brain disease. That makes the DSM a political document, not a medical one. This, of course, gives power over others to mental health practitioners who depend on a gullible public who fail to distinguish between legitimate medicine and junk science.

Psychiatry from its very beginning in 17th century England has always been a statist institution. They continue to cloak themselves in language befitting of a legitimate scientific endeavour with humanity's best interests at heart. As usual they keep changing the language they use to describe themselves. But there were no 'mental asylums' or 'care homes'(the terms become more and more benign-sounding) when psychiatry was first adopted by the state - they were called 'State Hospitals'.  It is statist to its very core and it has become today's tool of choice for social control, after seperation of church and state removed religion as the state's trump card when playing for social control.

Psychiatry is about coersion and excuses - locking up the innocent and excusing the guilty. Talk about turning the justice system on its head... on the whim of someone's subjective opinion. In terms of violating libertarian principles, this is so stark, one wonders how it has continued to escape the attention of so many ordinary men-in-the-street the world over, let alone libertarians.

Jim

p.s. an excellent three-part interview series with Szasz on ABC in 2009:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/stories/2009/2530830.htm

Mon. 12/06/18 23:13 EDT
.post #173

baxter:

Here's a connundrum for you. A blow to the head can leave no detectable lesions ...

How would you know unless you cut into the person's brain?

... and yet can trigger a seizure. Is the seizure behavior ...

Your expression "seizure behavior" borders on oxymoronic. "Behavior" is chosen; physiological events, such as seizures, heart rate changes, etc., are involuntary.

... due to brain injury or praxeology?

The seizure is related to the blow on the head, which has probably caused brain injury or some other damage or malfunction.



Some other Szasz videos:
Thomas Szasz on Socialism in Health Care
Dr. Thomas Szasz at the ISEPP 2011 Conference in L.A. (part 1) (part2)
A conversation with Thomas Szasz - a preview
Thomas Szasz - Part One (Does Mental Illness Exist?)
Thomas Szasz - Part Two (The Function of Psychiatry)
Thomas Szasz - Part Three (The Role of the State)
Thomas Szasz on America's Drug Forum pt.1of3 pt.2of3 pt.3of3
Tomas Szasz on mental health

Thurs. 12/06/21 13:07 EDT
.post #175

baxter:

"There was no evidence for a humoral imbalance causing illness, but the doctrine prevailed for two thousand years."

Here he spends a lot of time harping on certain antiquated nonsense (humoral imbalance), as if psychiatry is the only area where nonsense has appeared. For example, in science, we had the flat earth, phlogiston and epicycles.

The title of the essay from which this quote is taken is MENTAL ILLNESS AS BRAIN DISEASE: A BRIEF HISTORY LESSON.
You omitted the preceding and following sentences, so let me now supply them:

Thomas Szasz:

Psychiatric practice today requires that doctors and patients ignore evidence and be ignorant of history. There was no evidence for a humoral imbalance causing illness, but the doctrine prevailed for two thousand years. There is no evidence for a chemical imbalance causing mental illness, but that does not impair the doctrine's scientific standing or popularity.

Here are three of the four other instances of the expression "humoral imbalance":

The idea that mental illness is a bodily disease dates back to the premodern medical conception of disease as a "humoral imbalance," comically prefiguring the modern, supposedly scientific conception of it as "chemical imbalance."

In the nineteenth century, the scientific concept of disease as lesion replaced the Galenic concept of disease as humoral imbalance.

More specifically, the humoral imbalance theory led Rush to employ "bleeding, purging, low diet, and the tranquilizing chair. "The tranquilizing chair was a chair-like contraption for confining the patient and rotating him until he became dizzy or lost consciousness. This was supposed to rebalance the circulation in the brain. It was but a small step from the nineteenth-century's tranquilizing chair to the twentieth century's tranquilizing drug, supposed to rebalance the chemical imbalance in the patient's brain.

Szasz is "harping" on this, not "as if psychiatry is the only area where nonsense has appeared," but rather to provide, consistent with the essay's title, a brief history of (the psychiatric nonsense of) mental disease as brain disease.

baxter:

Of course all this harping would be relevant if only it weren't for the fact that psychiatry can evolve with time.

But does going from

- attributing "mental illness" to "humoral imbalance"

to

- attributing "mental illness" to "chemical imbalance"

constitute "evolution"?



As Szasz writes, Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose ("The more it changes, the more it's the same thing").

baxter:

"There is no evidence for a chemical imbalance causing mental illness, but that does not impair the doctrine's scientific standing or popularity."

This is surely untrue because administering a chemical imbalance (i.e. drugging someone) can alter their behavior and produce effects such as seizures and hallucinations.

But Szasz doesn't write "There is no evidence for a chemical imbalance producing effects such as behavioral alterations, seizures, and hallucinations," nor would he.

Szasz writes "There is no evidence for a chemical imbalance causing mental illness."

Szasz does not deny that ingesting a drug can produce or induce a physiological effect. Clearly, if you introduce some chemical which penetrates the blood-brain barrier, the expression "chemical imbalance" becomes somewhat meaningful. What's more, since you know what was introduced and in what amount, you clearly have evidence.

But this has nothing to do with psychiatry or "mental illness." Psychiatrists don't measure the neuro-chemical levels and ratios of acetylcholine, histamine, norepinephrine, dopamine, and serotonin, then, based on those numbers, make a diagnosis of "chemical balance" or "chemical imbalance." If they did that, they'd be doing neurology, not psychiatry.

• Neurologist: Clinical examination skills; empiricism; objectivity; surgery
  
• Psychiatrist: Rich description of mental phenomena, well developed interviewing skills; understanding multiple causation; appreciation of individual differences; interpersonal context; psychological and behavioral therapies

(Source)


Psychiatrists don't perform bio-chemical testing.
Psychiatrists perform socio-behavioral labeling.

Then, after the "mentally ill" label has been officially applied, they assert, without evidence, that the "mental illness" is "caused" by a "chemical imbalance." It's the pseudo-scientific equivalent of attributing behavior to "humoral imbalance" or "demonic possession," i.e., it's pure quackery and psychobabble. It's pure name-calling.

I find it ironic that Steve Wiseman summarizes Thomas Szasz's work as "...simply words and definitions". Does Wiseman think name-calling and slapping psychiatric labels on people constitutes bona fide medical practice? Does Wiseman think assaulting, incarcerating, poisoning, and torturing innocent persons constitutes bona fide medical practice? To "Dr." Wiseman I say "Physician, heal thyself."

Thurs. 12/06/21 15:47 EDT
.post #176

baxter:

Is vitamin deficiency, e.g. beriberi, a disease? Or do you need lesions to form first before getting diagnosed?

This is a sensible question, because "lesion" is a word that applies to living tissue. "Disease" is

...an abnormal condition affecting the body of an organism.

But "the mind" is not corporeal, i.e., of the body of an organism, so how can "the mind" have "lesions" or be "diseased"? So to suggest, as you seem to here, that "Well, just because we can't see lesions of the mind doesn't mean that the mind isn't diseased; after all, what about Beriberi?!" is not sensible. We can never "see lesions of the mind," because "the mind" is just an abstraction, and abstractions don't have "lesions," nor can abstractions be "diseased" or "healthy."

Thurs. 12/06/21 17:01 EDT
.post #177

DrunknMunky:

I use to respect this guy a lot but its been waning ever since I found out he belongs to the CCHR.

I used to respect Ron Paul a lot but it's been waning ever since I found out he belongs to the US Congress.

What do you have against the CCHR, anyway?

About CCHR:

CCHR has long fought to restore basic unalienable human rights to the field of mental health, including, but not limited to, full informed consent regarding the medical legitimacy of psychiatric diagnosis, the risks of psychiatric treatments, the right to all available medical alternatives, and the right to refuse any treatment considered harmful.

Accomplishments (a sampler):

• In the early 1970s, CCHR’s investigations led to government inquiries into numerous state psychiatric facilities in California, Illinois, Hawaii, Michigan and Missouri - resulting in hospital administrators and psychiatrists being dismissed, criminal and grand jury investigations being held, and closure of major psychiatric units due to the abuses CCHR had uncovered against patients.
  
• In 1976, due to CCHR’s efforts, the first law to protect patients against enforced electroshock and psychosurgery was passed in California, providing informed consent and banning their use on children under the age of 12.
  
• In the 1990s, CCHR helped uncover and expose that up to 150 restraint deaths occur each year in the U.S. alone, with nearly 10% of these being children, some as young as six.
  
• In the 1980s/early 1990s, CCHR spearheaded a campaign to expose and ban Deep Sleep Treatment (DST) at Chelmsford Private Psychiatric Hospital in Sydney, Australia. The "treatment" involved knocking the patient unconscious for three weeks with a cocktail of psychiatric drugs and electroshocking them daily, without their consent. It killed 48 people.
  
• CCHR photographed and then exposed secret psychiatric "slave labor" camps in South Africa where tens of thousands of Africans were incarcerated in the 1970s and 80s against their will in disused mining compounds, drugged and subjected to painful electroshock without anesthetics.
  
• CCHR in Germany conducted comprehensive research that established conclusively that Germany’s leading psychiatrists provided the theory as well as the "scientific" justification for the Nazi government to destroy "life unworthy of living." ... In 1995 CCHR published the acclaimed book
Psychiatrists: The Men Behind Hitler (see also MeTZelf).

• Along with officials and members of the Italian parliament, CCHR Italy inspected and investigated concentration-camp-like conditions in the country’s psychiatric asylums.
  
• CCHR’s investigations led to a major private psychiatric hospital chain in the U.S. being investigated by 14 federal and state investigations for fraud and patient abuse.

What's wrong with that? What other organization is doing these things? Which Christian, Jewish, or Muslim organizations are funding the fight against coercive psychiatry?

Here is Szasz:

We should honor CCHR because it is really the organization that for the first time in human history has organized a politically, socially, internationally significant voice to combat psychiatry. This has never happened in human history before.

DrunknMunky:

I can't take scientologists seriously...

Fine, but what does this have to do with Szasz? Szasz isn't a Scientologist.

Statement by the Owner and Producer of Szasz.com

The following statement is intended as response to requests for clarification regarding Dr. Szasz's co-founding of the Citizens Commission for Human Rights (CCHR). Thomas Szasz is not now nor has he ever been a Scientologist or a member of the Church of Scientology.

Dr. Szasz co-founded CCHR in the same spirit as he had co-founded -- with sociologist Erving Goffman and law professor George Alexander -- The American Association for the Abolition for Involuntary Mental Hospitalization (AAAIMH; see http://www.szasz.com/abolitionist.html)

Scientologists have joined Szasz's battle against institutional psychiatry. Dr. Szasz welcomes the support of Jews, Christians, Muslims, and any other religious or atheist group committed to the struggle against the Therapeutic State. Sharing this battle does not mean that Dr. Szasz supports the unrelated principles and causes of any religious or non-religious organization. This is explicit and implicit in Dr. Szasz's work. Everyone and anyone is welcome to join in the struggle for individual liberty and personal responsibility -- especially as these values are threatened by psychiatric ideas and interventions.