Psychiatric Justice

T. S. Szasz, The Manufacture of Madness, Ideology and Insanity, Psychiatric Justice, Psychiatric Slavery, Cruel Compassion. 

Szasz, T. S. Psychiatric Justice [1965]. With a new preface. Syracuse Syracuse University Press, 1988. 

The principles and practices of psychiatric justice here advocated by Rush not only characterize the administration of Soviet law, but are also becoming steadily more influential in the administration of English and American law. The resultant political organization I have named the Therapeutic State. (Thomas S. Szasz, Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry, and Psychiatric Justice.)... 

It is in forensic psychiatry, finally, that we find the best examples of how preoccupation with the mental health of victimized individuals or groups—Negroes, persons accused of crime, old people —actually works to their detriment, serving only to confirm them in their debased roles as defective objects, and to elevate their caretakers to the exalted position of loving parents. I have discussed this subject in other publications. A brief critical examination of the views of one of the leading exponents of what I have called psychiatric justice should suffice here. 

See Thomas S. Szasz, Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry, and Psychiatric Justice. 

For numerous case histories of the ways in which the individual accused of mental illness is unprotected by procedural safeguards, see Thomas S. Szasz, Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry. For four extensive case records of the denial, on psychiatric grounds, of the right to trial guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, see Thomas S, Szasz, Psychiatric Justice. 

It is estimated that 25-50% of patients in long-term care facilities suffer from neuropsychiatric disorders that are functionally impairing/ At least 26% of incarcerated adults and 52% of children in the juvenile justice system meet criteria for a DSM-IV-TR disorder/ When substance abuse/dependency is included in the adult population, the incidence rises to 71%. Psychiatric pharmacist specialists can provide consultation on optimizing drug therapy for patients in these settings. 

Psychiatrists, psychologists, philosophers, politicians, and others who labor to assimilate mental illness to body illness systematically fail to acknowledge that an intrinsic function—I would say primary function—of the mental hospital has always been the psychiatric segregation and control of unwanted persons, justified by their alleged dangerousness to themselves and/or others. This contention is confirmed by the whole history of psychiatry the so-called psychiatric abuses in National Socialist Germany and the Soviet Union and the continued popularity, in the West, of psychiatric rationales and facilities for imprisoning individuals whose detention cannot be justified as punishment for crime.Recent opinions by Justices of the Supreme Court amply support this interpretation. 

Common justice demands, say Sprenger and Kramer in the Malleus, that a witch should not be condemned to death unless she is convicted of her own confession. 2 According to Robbins, Once accused, the victim had to endure torture and inevitably make a confession of guilt. Every witch trial had its confessions. Similarly, every sanity hearing has its psychiatric self-incrimination the state-employed psychiatrist demonstrates to the court, from statements made by or attributed to the victim, that the patient is suffering from mental illness. The records of witch trials are as full of documented confessions of pacts with the devil and other evidences of witchcraft, as are the records of modern Institutional Psychiatry of hallucinations, delusions, and other evidences of insanity. One example of this should sufi ce here. ... 

Believing that Scientists now generally agree that human behavior is caused rather than willed, Bazelon thinks he has solved the problem of justice all that is needed are more scientific facts about the defendant. In this New Jerusalem, justice is dispensed not with even-handed impartiality but with tender-hearted psychodynamic insight. What is usually required of the [psychiatric] experts, explains Bazelon, is a statement in simple terms of why the accused acted as he did—the psychodynamics of his behavior. . . Where it occurs, under the Durham rule [handed down by Bazelon], the accused may be seen as a sick person and confined to a hospital for treatment, not to a prison for punishment. This is just the point In the courtroom, the more we talk about the psychodynamics of the accused, the more we come to believe that he is a sick patient in need of treatment. The unacknowledged aim, and assuredly the practical effect, of this tactic is that the participation of persons other than the defendant in the crea-... 

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