Szasz, Thomas

Szasz, Thomas. Ceremonial Chemistry The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts, and Pushers. Revised Ed. Syracuse, N.Y Syracuse University Press, 2003. This classic and controversial work explores the culmral and social underpinnings for attimdes toward and treatment of drug users and traffickers. 

Milton Friedman and Thomas S. Szasz. On Liberty and Drugs. Washington, D.C. ... 

The rationale of the program was based on Thomas Szasz s groundbreaking work on the game-quality of conduct. Leary explained it thus ... 

THOMAS SZASZ is Professor of Psychiafry Emerifus, Sfafe Universify of New York Upsfafe Medical Universify, Syracuse, New York. He is fhe au-fhor of Our Right to Drugs (Praeger, 1992), The Meaning of Mind (Praeger,... 

Pharmacracy medicine and politics in America / Thomas Szasz. p. cm. 

The following resolution of the Executive Committee of the American Psychiatric Association, dated Mar. 7, 1954, is illustrative Mental illnesses arc well-defined entities clearly described and delineated in the Standard Nomenclature the diagnosis and treatment of mental illnesses remain a medical responsibility. (Quoted in Henry A. Davidson, The semantics of psychotherapy, Amer. J. Psychiat., 115 410-413 [Nov.], 1958 p. 411.) The American Psychoanalytic Association has likewise repudiated so-called lay analysis and prohibits the training of nonphysicians in its approved institutes. For further critical discussion, see Thomas S. Szasz, Psychiatry, psychotherapy, and psychology, AM.A. Arch. Gen. Psychiat., 1 455-463 (Nov.), 1959, and Three problems in contemporary psychoanalytic training, ibid., 3 82-94 960-... 

In the same way, the usual medical-psychiatric perspective on madness leads to an exclusive focus on the so-called mental patient and a corresponding neglect of the psychiatrist. For more than a decade, I have insisted that this perspective is in part insufficient, and in part totally false and that, to understand Institutional Psychiatry (or the Mental Health Movement), we must study psychiatrists, not mental patients. In this connection, see Thomas S. Szasz, Science and public policy The crime of involuntary mental hospitalization, Med. Opin, ir Rev., 4 4-35 (May), 1968. 

I have indicated the origins of this psychiatric mythology in Chapter 5, will trace its evolution further in Chapter 8, and shall discuss and document its recent history and present function in Chapters 9-13. See also Thomas S. Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness. 

Thus, Robert H. Felix, former director of the National Institute of Mental Health and dean of the Saint Louis University Medical School, asserts flatly that We ipsychiatrists] do deal with illnesses of the mind. (Italics in the original.) (Robert H. Felix, The image of the psychiatrist Past, present and future, Amer. J. Psychiat., 121 318-322 [Oct.], 1964, p. 320.) Criticism of this position is considered psychiatric heresy. See, for example, Frederick G. Glaser, The dichotomy game A further consideration of the writings of Dr. Thomas Szasz, Amer. J. Psychiat., 121 1069-1074 (May), 1965 p. 1073. 

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.)... 

The English anthropologist Radcliffe-Brown puts it this way. In any technical activity an adequate statement of the purpose of any particular act or series of acts constitutes by itself a sufficient explanation. But ritual acts differ from technical acts in having in all instances some expressive or symbolic element in them.. . . My own view is that the negative and positive rites of savages exist and persist because they are part of the mechanism by which an orderly society maintains itself in existence, serving as they do to establish certain fundamental social values. (A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, On Taboo, in Talcott Parsons, et al. [Eds.], Theories of Society, Vol. II, pp. 951-959 pp. 954, 958.) For a discussion of the distinction between ritual and technical action in psychoanalysis, see Thomas S. Szasz, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, especially pp. 9 7-... 

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

Thomas S. Szasz, Science and public policy The crime of involuntary mental hospitalization, Med. Opin. ir Rev., 4 24-35 (May), 1968. 

In this connection, see Thomas S. Szasz, The psychiatrist as double agent. Trans-action, 4 16-24 (O t.), 1967. 

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. 

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