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The ethics of psychiatric therapy is the very negation of the ethics of political liberty. The former embraces absolute power, provided it is used to ...more

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The medical profession's classic prescription for coping with such predicaments, Primum non nocere (First, do no harm), sounds better than it is. In f...more

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The term 'deinstitutionalization' conceals some simple truths, namely, that old, unwanted persons, formerly housed in state hospitals, are now housed ...more

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The pressure to reduce health care costs is aimed only at the treatment of real diseases. There is no pressure to reduce the costs of treating fictiti...more

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The cruelty intrinsic to the workhouse system was excused by the need to discourage idleness, much as the malice intrinsic to the mental hospital syst...more

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The young and the old are defenseless against relatives who want to get rid of them by casting them in the role of mental patient,and against psychiat...more

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The fatal weakness of most psychiatric historiographies lies in the historians' failure to give sufficient weight to the role of coercion in psychiatr...more

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When and why do we attribute a person's behavior to brain disease, and when and why do we not do so? Briefly, the answer is that we often attribute ba...more

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Although both home and mental illness are complex, modern ideas, we have fallen into the habit of using phrases such as "housing the homeless" and "tr...more

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A vast amount of psychiatric effort has been, and continues to be, devoted to legal and quasi-legal activities. In my opinion, the only certain result...more

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Psychiatrists look for twisted molecules and defective genes as the causes of schizophrenia, because schizophrenia is the name of a disease. If Christ...more