Thomas Szasz (1920-)

Thomas Szasz is or was a Professor at SUNY Syracuse. His main arguments are:

"Psychiatry actively obscures the difference between (mis)behavior and disease, in its quest to help or harm parties to conflicts. By calling certain people "diseased", psychiatry attempts to deny them responsibility as moral agents, in order to better control them....According to Szasz, to understand the metaphorical nature of the term disease in psychiatry, one must first understand its literal meaning in the rest of medicine. To be a true disease, the entity must first, somehow be capable of being approached, measured, or tested in scientific fashion. Second, to be confirmed as a disease, a condition must demonstrate pathology at the cellular or molecular level. (Furthermore,)...’mental illness’ is an expression, a metaphor that describes an offending, disturbing, shocking, or vexing conduct, action, or pattern of behavior, such as schizophrenia, as an illness or disease. Szasz wrote:

'If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic.'

While people behave and think in ways that are very disturbing, and that may resemble a disease process (pain, deterioration, response to various interventions), this does not mean they actually have a disease. To Szasz, disease can only mean something people have, while behavior is what people do. People who are said (by themselves or others) to have a mental illness can only have, at best, a fake disease. Diagnoses of mental illness or mental disorder (the latter expression called by Szasz a 'weasel term' for mental illness) are passed off as scientific categories but they remain merely judgments (judgments of disdain) to support certain uses of power by psychiatric authorities. In that line of thinking, schizophrenia is not the name of a disease entity but a judgment of extreme psychiatric and social reprobation.

Szasz also argues that individuals should be able to choose when to die without interference from medicine or the state, just as they are able to choose when to conceive without outside interference. Death control is analogous to birth control; he considers suicide to be among the most fundamental rights, but he opposes state-sanctioned euthanasia.”