Thomas Szasz quote: The young and the old are defenseless against relatives who want to get rid of them by casting them in ...

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 psychiatrists whose livelihood depends on defining them as mentally ill.

~ Thomas Szasz ~

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The young and the old are defenseless against relatives who want to get rid of them by casting them ...

Picture of Thomas Szasz — Thomas SzaszCruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted

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Psychiatrists classify a person as neurotic if he suffers from his problems in living and a psychotic if he makes others suffer.

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Is psychiatry a medical enterprise concerned with treating diseases, or a humanistic enterprise concerned with helping persons with their personal pro...

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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 ...

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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...

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

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We cannot institutionalize helping the "victims" of personal disasters.

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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