of Unspoken Index
“Why don’t you have
a right to say you
are Jesus? And why isn’t the proper
response to that „congratulations“?”
Thomas Szasz (1920–2012)
Americký psychiatr maďarského původu, lidskoprávní aktivista, spisovatel, vysokoškolský profesor a autor knihy The Myth of Mental Illness. Ačkoli je považován za zakladatele antipsychiatrie, Szasz se v pozdějších letech své kariéry od tohoto hnutí distancoval. Přestože negoval existenci duševních nemocí, věřil v existenci lidského utrpení, tudíž v zásadě neodmítal psychiatrii, psychologiii a psychoanalýzu jako možnost pomoci, ovšem pouze za předpokladu, že je založená na vzájemném souhlasu a porozumění pacienta s lékařem. Jeho nejostřejší kritika se týkala především státem zřízené psychiatrické instituce a kategorizování „různorodosti lidské mysli“ jako duševní choroby. Popíral existenci schizofrenie, ADHD, deprese, úzkostí apod. jako autonomní nemoci na stejné úrovní jako je např. tuberkulóza, neurosyfilis atd., čímž si vysloužil negativní kritiku ze strany lékařské i akademické společnosti v USA. V roce 2012 spáchal sebevraždu ve svém domě v Manliu, New York.
Typhoid fever is a disease. Spring fever – is not. It’s a figure of speech. Piece of poetry. A metaphor. All mental diseases are metaphors. Metaphors of disabled by living.
youtube.com/watch?v=zQegsqYhuZE
Knihy a eseje:
Pain and Pleasure: A Study of Bodily Feelings.
The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct
Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry: An Inquiry into the Social Uses of Mental Health Practices
Psychiatric Justice
The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: The Theory and Method of Autonomous Psychotherapy
Ideology and Insanity: Essays on the Psychiatric Dehumanization of Man
The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement
The Second Sin
The Age of Madness: A History of Involuntary Mental Hospitalization Presented in Selected Texts (editor)
Ceremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts, and Pushers
Schizophrenia: The Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry
Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus and His Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry
Heresies
The Theology of Medicine: The Political-Philosophical Foundations of Medical Ethics
Psychiatric Slavery
The Myth of Psychotherapy: Mental Healing as Religion, Rhetoric, and Repression
Sex by Prescription: The Startling Truth about Today’s Sex Therapy
The Therapeutic State: Psychiatry in the Mirror of Current Events
Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences
The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary
Our Right to Drugs: The Case for a Free Market
A Lexicon of Lunacy: Metaphoric Malady, Moral Responsibility, and Psychiatry
Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society’s Unwanted
The Meaning of Mind: Language, Morality, and Neuroscience
Fatal Freedom: The Ethics and Politics of Suicide
Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America
Liberation by Oppression: A Comparative Study of Slavery and Psychiatry
Faith in Freedom: Libertarian Principles and Psychiatric Practices
Words to the Wise: A Medical-Philosophical Dictionary
My Madness Saved Me: The Madness and Marriage of Virginia Woolf
Coercion as Cure: A Critical History of Psychiatry
The Medicalization of Everyday Life: Selected Essays
Psychiatry: The Science of Lies
Antipsychiatry: Quackery Squared
Suicide Prohibition: The Shame of Medicine
“If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.”
Excerpts: Thomas Szasz on Libertanian principles and Psychiatric practices
6:43
I want to distinguish this very sharply from what todays people think of psychiatry. Or perhaps still do, today maybe less or more. That psychiatry is a part of medicine, that helps people. Except as of psychoanalysis. You go to a doctor and you pay to psychologist and you talk to him and if you don’t like it, you leave. I’m not talking about this at all. I am talking about psychiatry whose paradigmatic interventions are violent.
7:25
Now, Let me explain to you what I mean by that. What distinguishes surgeons from other doctors? That they cut into the body. What distinguishes radiologist from other doctors? He takes pictures, excellent pictures, interprets them and so on. Now, what distinguishes psychiatrist from other doctors? One is, that they detain people, they deprive people of liberty, who have not comitted any crimes. Called single commitment. Other one is a symmetrical operation which virtually no one ever links to single commmitment what I insist is the same thing, and that is insanity defence, The one keys innocent people are incarcerated and the other keys, guilty people are excused …
8:38
Insanity defence, which is at the heart of psychiatry, also going back 300 years, is at the heart of a tobacco litigation, alcohol litigation and so on. The idea is that individual actors in these assesments are not actors, but puppets. Someone else is responsible for their movements. Now, find who that someone else is and punish him. How did this originate? In my lecture I outlined three things. Why is psychiatry a thread to freedom and responsibility, I just described that. How did this coming to being, that is difficult to condense, let me remind you, in this respect …
9:38
the development of psychiatry, probably most of you know already, is parallel to decline of religion. And the things that used to be controlled up to a seventeenth century, really up to the enlightment, were controled by religion as a belief system and as social organisation as alliance of church and state were gradually shifted over to psychiatry
10:10
Here again, I’ll mention one example of this. …What is, still in theory, but still is, what was the greatest sin in the Jewish and Christian religions, suicide. Now, suicide was also severely punished. Now you may ask, how do you punish suicide? ….. very well, the corpse wasn’t burried in a sacred ground, property of the person was confiskated, it’s complicated, sorry. But that became the primary ground for mental hospitalization back in the 18th century.
11:10
If you comitted suicide, that meant you were out of your mind, the whole idea of sanity defence was first introduced post humously only later was it used for peole who tried to kill somebody, king or prime minister. Virtually all of the sins are mental ilnesses. If you eat too much, that was called glutony, now it’s called eating disorder and so on…
14:50
They are liberating pacient from his “psychosis” by treating him. Whatever that means, by lobotomy, drugs, electric shocks. They are liberating him by depriving him of his liberty. It is the same when you hear about Iraq, we’ve liberated them…. This is one of those propositions which you either believe or disbelieve because there is no intelectual content tool other then denying the confined person his capacity as a human agent. This was also rationalization for slavery, this was rationalisation for denying women rights, generally, subjection of women… Psychiatrists always say: We are taking care of them. We are shielding them from a burden. This is what you hear. Shielding people from the burden of mental illness.
16:30
Now, despite my critics, I am not careless about mental ilness, which of course, doesn’t exist. But human suffering does exist, which nowadays is called mental illness. That’s very real and I think such people ought to be helped, on their terms. Otherwise, help is not help. Otherwise help is coersion.
I mean, life is no bowl of cherries.
Thomas Szasz on Socialism Health Care (1994)
Excerpts
4:28
As I see it, the whole health care rhetoric is also socialist rhetoric in terms of disease treatment and so forth I’ll be sayin a lot more about that. Now when we talk about the government taking a role in protecting people from disease first thing I want to mention that very concept of disease is not as simple as it may seem and it’s meaning has changed. Now what is a disease? You may think you know what is a disease, and of course you do, but you don’t.
Mycobacterium tuberculosis
5:10
Uh, because those of you who think of this in kind of a personal and down to earth way mainly about yourself, will think that disease is something, first of all, that you don’t want. You rather be without. Secondly, that it is something that happens to you. Something like leukemia or diabetes or arthritis, this is not something that you want and fourthly, it is something which one can genuinely philosophically say is not part of you. In other words, if you have, let’s say tuberculosis or you have sore throat, now or for this week, next week when you haven’t got it, you will still be you, it is not a part of you.
6:02
Now this is in some ways, last but not least, there is a scientific dimension of it, which si very important that to key it you don’t have to be a physician or professional to realize that modern medicine is relatively recent going really back to about middle, second half of the eighteenth century and depends really on the development of modern medical technology mainly autopsy, tissue steeling, pathology and the more sofisticated techniques, for examining the body so that I have always thought that the analogy between the gold standart in economic affairs and pathological leisance in medicine, make a very nice analogy, that disease is not something that doctors make up, it is something that define and is typically found in dead bodies. And how do you know that somebody has a disease? That somebody dies and the pathologist examines the liver, kidney, lungs and so on and they find that someone had tuberculosis, and their lungs looks different than normal lungs and so on. That’s simple. And of course, there are new diseases, like AIDS and so on, but these are all found by pathologists on people who are cold sick. But the clinical diagnoses are secondary, termed by pathological diagnoses, that is a medicine.
Thomas Eakins: The Agnew Clinic (1889)
MRI Scan: Neurosyphilis
7:35
At least that was the case, since I went to medical school, fifty years ago, this has changed, quite rapidly, but this procedure was never true of psychiatry, beacuse psychiatrist always were a medical specialists who treated diseases which not exist. In the sense, that pathologist never saw them. Pathologist going back, never saw madness, they kept looking for diseases and the only and most important one that they found so far was neurosyphilis, now, neurosyphilis as you know is a pretty bad thing and if you have neurosyphilis after a while you don’t act normally so that causes madness. And then, of course, if pathologist found this then this became cause of disease. Now, one of those things which happens is, I have to get this straight, if pathologist finds this it’s no longer mental disease than it’s a real disease, it’s a brain disease. And neurosyphilis still exist! It’s very rare now after penicilin but it’s still existing, but psychiatrist have nothing to do with it if someone has neurosyphilis because it’s treated by neurologist or specialist in infectious diseases.
9:07
Now this is important because, from psychiatric basis, in our day we have developed to a point where diseases are no longer defined by pathologist but are esentially defined by political process. And I will ilustrate that as I will go on. … Now, generally speaking, diseases are things, which are unwanted behaviours. Now who are they unwanted by? They may be unwanted by individual himself, in which case he or she may call it disease or they maybe earned it by psychiatrist or most typically by society or the authorities of the state. Best example is of course, drug abuse, substance abuse, but the important thing, we’ll come back to that. One more important thing about disease, the entire health care debate is premised on an idea, which is wonderful idea, it’s very simple idea is only one thing wrong visit, it is totaly folious.
10:18
Now let me tell you, what that idea is, and I never see this mentioned, again it is something which I tell you and you will say: Of course, but I never see this mentioned and it is absolutely crucial. Now the premise is, that diseases require treatment.
10:39
So the thing to do, is avoid diseases so you don’t need a treatment which will then cost a lot of money to everybody, because obviously nobody pays for it anymore, it’s you know, you pay for everybody else’s disease except your own disease, so the thing to do is to prevent diseases. Sound alright?
Hieronymus Bosch: Extracting the stone of madness (1516)
11:00
No. Disease don’t require treatment, diseases are natural events like oil in the ground, it’s a phenomenon! Like colony cancer. Oil in the ground doesn’t need to be extracted, people want it to be extracted. So diseases don’t require treatment, some people want their disease treated, okay? And some people don’t want their disease treated.
Na začátku roku 1992 byl žalován vdovou po psychiatrovi, který se spáchal sebevraždu zatímco byl pod Szaszovou psychologickou péčí. Jeho vdova žalovala Szasze, že se dopustil pochybení a zabití (doporučil jejímu manželovi, aby přestal užívat drogu běžně předepisovanou ke zmírnění manické deprese). O šest měsíců později se muž oběsil poté, co se zbil kladivem do hlavy a podřezal si hrdlo. Nakonec se domluvili na mimosoudním vyrovnání (650 000 USD).
Szasz se k žalobě nikdy oficiálně nevyjádřil. Pouze argumentoval, že každý člověk má „nezcizitelné právo“ spáchat sebevraždu, pokud se cítí povinen to udělat.
V roce 2012 si T. Szasz zlomil obratel T10. Aby se vyhnul nesnesitelné chronické bolesti a zachoval si vlastní autonomii rozhodl se ukončit svůj život spolykáním enormní dávky léků na bolest.
„Autonomy… is freedom to develop one’s self - to increase one’s knowledge, improve one’s skills, and achieve responsibility for one’s conduct. And it is freedom to lead one’s own life, to choose among alternative courses of action so long as no injury to others results.“
Thomas Szasz (1988). “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: The Theory and Method of Autonomous Psychotherapy”, p.22, Syracuse University Press
Zdroje:
http://www.szasz.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Szasz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC9r3Gs8XuU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQegsqYhuZE
https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipsychiatrie
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(12)61789-9/fulltext
https://depts.washington.edu/psychres/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/100-Papers-in-Clinical-Psychiatry-Conceptual-issues-in-psychiatry-The-Myth-of-Mental-Illness.pdf
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6Om9QYGinAtPFtpINcdYxA?si=xoiBIpEuQga1czFZCYH6wA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uzx2UWKvrM4&ab_channel=FiringLinewithWilliamF.Buckley%2CJr.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Riet8REzsQ&ab_channel=unibirmsocialwork