Thomas Szasz

"Mental illness" is an expression, a metaphor that describes an offending, disturbing, shocking, or vexing conduct, action, or pattern of behavior, such as packaged under the wide-ranging term 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."[16]^: 85 He maintained that, while people behave and think in disturbing ways, and those ways 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". Diseases are "malfunctions of the human body, of the heart, the liver, the kidney, the brain" while "no behavior or misbehavior is a disease or can be a disease. That's not what diseases are." Szasz cited drapetomania as an example of a behavior that many in society did not approve of, being labeled and widely cited as a disease. Likewise, women who did not bend to a man's will were said to have hysteria.[17] He thought that psychiatry actively obscures the difference between behavior and disease in its quest to help or harm parties in conflicts. He maintained that, by calling people diseased, psychiatry attempts to deny them responsibility as moral agents in order to better control them.

In Szasz's view, people who are said by themselves or others to have a mental illness can only have, at best, "problems in living". 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 becomes not the name of a disease entity but a judgment of extreme psychiatric and social disapprobation. Szasz called schizophrenia "the sacred symbol of psychiatry" because those so labeled have long provided and continue to provide justification for psychiatric theories, treatments, abuses, and reforms.

The figure of the psychotic or schizophrenic person to psychiatric experts and authorities, according to Szasz, is analogous with the figure of the heretic or blasphemer to theological experts and authorities. 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.

A genuine disease must also be found on the autopsy table (not merely in the living person) and meet pathological definition instead of being voted into existence by members of the American Psychiatric Association. "Mental illnesses" are really problems in living. They are often "like a" disease, argued Szasz, which makes the medical metaphor understandable, but in no way validates it as an accurate description or explanation. Psychiatry is a pseudoscience that parodies medicine by using medical-sounding words invented especially over the last one hundred years. To be clear, heart break and heart attack, or spring fever and typhoid fever belong to two completely different logical categories, and treating one as the other constitutes a category error. Psychiatrists are the successors of "soul doctors", priests who dealt and deal with the spiritual conundrums, dilemmas, and vexations – the "problems in living" – that have troubled people forever.

Psychiatry's main methods are assessment, medication, conversation or rhetoric and incarceration. To the extent that psychiatry presents these problems as "medical diseases", its methods as "medical treatments", and its clients – especially involuntary – as medically ill patients, it embodies a lie and therefore constitutes a fundamental threat to freedom and dignity. Psychiatry, supported by the state through various Mental Health Acts, has become a modern secular state religion according to Szasz. It is a vastly elaborate social control system, using both brute force and subtle indoctrination, which disguises itself under the claims of being rational, systematic and therefore scientific.

According to Szasz, many people fake their presentation of mental illness, i.e., they are malingering. They do so for gain, for example, in order to escape a burden like evading the draft, or to gain access to drugs or financial support, or for some other personally meaningful reason. By definition, the malingerer is knowingly deceitful (although malingering itself has also been called a mental illness or disorder). Szasz mentions malingering in many of his works, but it is not what he has in mind to explain many other manifestations of so-called "mental illness". In those cases, so-called "patients" have something personally significant to communicate – their "problems in living" – but unable to express this via conventional means they resort to illness-imitation behaviour, a somatic protolanguage or "body language", which psychiatrists and psychologists have misguidedly interpreted as the signs/symptoms of real illness.[18] So, for example, "analyzing the origin of the hysterical protolanguage Szasz states that it has a double origin: – the first root is in the somatic structure of human being. The human body is subject to illnesses and disabilities expressed through somatic signs (like paralysis, convulsions, etc.) and somatic sensations (like pain, tiredness, etc.); – the second root can be found into cultural factors."[19]

Szasz believed that if we accept that "mental illness" is a euphemism for behaviors that are disapproved of, then the state has no right to force psychiatric "treatment" on these individuals. Similarly, the state should not be able to interfere in mental health practices between consenting adults (for example, by legally controlling the supply of psychotropic drugs or psychiatric medication). The medicalization of government produces a "therapeutic state", designating someone as, for example, "insane" or as a "drug addict".

In Ceremonial Chemistry (1973), he argued that the same persecution that targeted witches, Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals now targets "drug addicts" and "insane" people. Szasz argued that all these categories of people were taken as scapegoats of the community in ritual ceremonies. To underscore this continuation of religion through medicine, he even takes as an example obesity: instead of concentrating on junk food (ill-nutrition), physicians denounced hypernutrition. According to Szasz, despite their scientific appearance, the diets imposed were a moral substitute to the former fasts, and the social injunction not to be overweight is to be considered as a moral order, not as scientific advice as it claims to be. As with those thought bad (insane people), and those who took the wrong drugs (drug addicts), medicine created a category for those who had the wrong weight (obesity).

Szasz argued that psychiatrics were created in the 17th century to study and control those who erred from the medical norms of social behavior; a new specialization, drogophobia, was created in the 20th century to study and control those who erred from the medical norms of drug consumption; and then, in the 1960s, another specialization, bariatrics (from the Greek βάρος baros, for "weight"), was created to deal with those who erred from the medical norms concerning the weight the body should have. Thus, he underscores that in 1970, the American Society of Bariatric Physicians had 30 members, and already 450 two years later.

Just as legal systems work on the presumption that a person is innocent until proven guilty, individuals accused of crimes should not be presumed incompetent simply because a doctor or psychiatrist labels them as such. Mental incompetence should be assessed like any other form of incompetence, i.e., by purely legal and judicial means with the right of representation and appeal by the accused.

In an analogy to birth control, Szasz argued 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. He considered suicide to be among the most fundamental rights, but he opposed state-sanctioned euthanasia.

In his 2006 book about Virginia Woolf he stated that she put an end to her life by a conscious and deliberate act, her suicide being an expression of her freedom of choice.[20][21]

Szasz believed that testimony about the mental competence of a defendant should not be admissible in trials. Psychiatrists testifying about the mental state of an accused person's mind have about as much business as a priest testifying about the religious state of a person's soul in our courts. Insanity was a legal tactic invented to circumvent the punishments of the Church, which at the time included confiscation of the property of those who committed suicide, often leaving widows and orphans destitute. Only an insane person would do such a thing to his widow and children, it was successfully argued. This is legal mercy masquerading as medicine, according to Szasz.[22]

No one should be deprived of liberty unless he is found guilty of a criminal offense. Depriving a person of liberty for what is said to be his own good is immoral. Just as a person suffering from terminal cancer may refuse treatment, so should a person be able to refuse psychiatric treatment.

Drug addiction is not a "disease" to be cured through legal drugs but a social habit. Szasz also argues in favor of a free market for drugs. He criticized the war on drugs, arguing that using drugs is in fact a victimless crime. Prohibition itself constituted the crime. He argued that the war on drugs leads states to do things that would have never been considered half a century before, such as prohibiting a person from ingesting certain substances or interfering in other countries to impede the production of certain plants, e.g. coca eradication plans, or the campaigns against opium; both are traditional plants opposed by the Western world. Although Szasz was skeptical about the merits of psychotropic medications, he favored the repeal of drug prohibition.[23]

Szasz also drew analogies between the persecution of the drug-using minority and the persecution of Jewish and homosexual minorities.

The Nazis spoke of having a "Jewish problem". We now speak of having a drug-abuse problem. Actually, "Jewish problem" was the name the Germans gave to their persecution of the Jews; "drug-abuse problem" is the name we give to the persecution of people who use certain drugs.[16]^: 64

Szasz cites former U.S. Representative James M. Hanley's reference to drug users as "vermin", using "the same metaphor for condemning persons who use or sell illegal drugs that the Nazis used to justify murdering Jews by poison gas – namely, that the persecuted persons are not human beings, but 'vermin.'"[24]

Robert Evan Kendell presents (in Schaler, 2005[41]) a critique of Szasz's conception of disease and the contention that mental illness is "mythical" as presented in The Myth of Mental Illness. Kendell's arguments include the following:

1. Szasz's conception of disease exclusively in terms of "lesion", i.e. morphological abnormality, is arbitrary and his conclusions based on this idea represent special pleading. There are non-psychiatric conditions that remain defined solely in terms of syndrome, e.g. migraine, torticollis, essential tremor, blepharospasm, torsion dystonia. Szasz's scepticism regarding syndromally defined diseases – only in relation to psychiatry – is entirely arbitrary. Many diseases that are outside the purview of psychiatry are defined purely in terms of the constellation of the symptoms, signs and natural history they present yet Szasz has not expressed any doubt regarding their existence. Is syndrome-based diagnosis only problematic for psychiatry but without issue for the remaining branches of medicine? If syndrome-based diagnosis is unsound on account of its absence of objectivity then it must be generally unsound and not only for psychiatry.
2. Szasz's ostensibly exclusive criterion of disease as morphological abnormality – i.e., a lesion made evident "by post-mortem examination of organs and tissues" – is unsound because it inadvertently includes many conditions that are not considered to be diseases by virtue of the fact that they don't produce suffering or disability, e.g., functionally inconsequential chromosomal translocations and deletions, fused second and third toes, dextrocardia. Szasz's conception of disease does not distinguish between necessary versus sufficient conditions in relation to diagnostic criteria. In branches of medicine other than psychiatry, morphological abnormality per se is not considered sufficient cause to make a diagnosis of disease; functional abnormality is the necessary condition.
3. Szasz's criticism of syndrome-based diagnoses is divorced from a consideration of the history of medicine. In medicine (in general) diseases are defined in terms of a multitude of criteria, these include: (a) morbid anatomy, e.g., mitral stenosis, cholecystitis; (b) histologically, e.g., most cancers, Alzheimer's disease; (c) infective organism, e.g. Tuberculosis, Measles; (d) physiologically, e.g. myasthenia gravis; (e) biochemically, e.g. aminoaciduria; (e) chromosomally, e.g. trisomy 21, Turner's syndrome; (f) molecularly, e.g. thalassemia; (g) genetically, e.g. Huntington's disease, cystic fibrosis; and (h) syndrome, e.g. migraine, torticollis, essential tremor, blepharospasm, torsion dystonia and most (so-called) mental disorders. The more objective definitions of disease – specified as (a) through (g) – became possible through the accumulation of scientific knowledge and the development of relevant technology. Initially the underlying pathology of some diseases was unknown and they were diagnosed only in terms of syndrome – no lesion could be demonstrated "by post-mortem examination of organs and tissues" (as Szasz requires) until later in history, e.g. malaria was diagnosed solely on the basis of syndrome until the advent of microbiology. A strict application of Szasz's criterion necessitates the conclusion that diseases such as malaria were "mythical" until medical microbiology arrived, at which point they became "real". In this regard Szasz's criterion of disease is unsound by virtue of its contradictory results.
4. Szasz's contention that mental illness is not associated with any morphological abnormality is uninformed by genetics, biochemistry, and current research results on the etiology of mental illness. Genes are essentially instructions for the synthesis of proteins. Hence, any condition that is even partly hereditary necessarily manifests structural abnormality at the molecular level. Regardless of whether the actual morphological abnormality can be identified, if a condition has a hereditary component then it has a biological basis. Twin and adoption studies have strongly demonstrated that heredity is a major factor in the etiology of schizophrenia; thus there must be some biological difference between schizophrenics and non-schizophrenics. In relation to major depressive disorder a difference of response between euthymic and depressed individuals to antidepressant drugs and to tryptophan depletion has been demonstrated. These results in addition to twin and adoption studies provide evidence of an underlying molecular – hence structural – abnormality to depression.
5. Szasz contends that, "Strictly speaking, disease or illness can affect only the body; hence, there can be no mental illness" and this idea is foundational to Szasz's position. In actuality, there are no physical or mental illnesses per se; there are only diseases of organisms, of persons. The bifurcation of organisms into minds and bodies is the product of the Cartesian dualism that became dominant in the late 18th century and it was at this time that the notion of insanity as something qualitatively different from other illnesses became entrenched. In actuality, brain and body comprise one integrated and indivisible system and no illness "respects" the abstraction of mind vs. body upon which Szasz's argument rests. There are no illnesses that are purely mental or purely physical. Somatic pain is itself a mental phenomenon as is the subjective distress produced by the acute phase response at the onset of illness or immediately after trauma. Similarly, conditions such as schizophrenia and major depressive disorder produce somatic symptoms. Any illness lies somewhere within a continuum between the poles of mind and body; the extrema are purely theoretical abstractions and are unoccupied by any real affliction. The mind/body division persists purely for pragmatic reasons and forms no real part of modern biomedical science.

Edward Shorter[42] replied to Szasz's essay "The myth of mental illness: 50 years later",[43] which was published in the journal The Psychiatrist (and delivered as a plenary address at the International Congress of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in Edinburgh on 24 June 2010) – in recognition of the 50th anniversary of The Myth of Mental Illness – with the following principal criticisms:

1. Szasz's critique is implicitly premised on a conception of mind drawn from the psychiatry of the early-mid 20th century – namely psychoanalytic psychiatry – and Szasz has not updated his critique in light of later developments in psychiatry. The referent of Szasz's critique – Freud's mind – is to be found only in the historical record and some isolated islands of psychoanalytic practice. To this extent, Szasz's critique does not address contemporary biologically-oriented psychiatry and is irrelevant. Certainly the phrase mental illness occurs in the contemporary psychiatric lexicon, but that is merely a legacy of the earlier psychoanalytic influence upon psychiatry; the term does not reflect a real belief that psychiatric disease – Shorter's preferred term – originates in the mind, an abstraction as Szasz rightly explains.
2. Szasz concedes that some so-called mental illnesses may have a neurological basis – but adds that were such a biological basis discovered for these so-called mental illnesses, they would have to be reclassified from mental illnesses to brain diseases, which would vindicate his position. Shorter explains that the problem with Szasz's argument here is that it is the contention of biological psychiatry that so-called mental illnesses are actually brain diseases. Modern psychiatry has de facto dispensed with the idea of mental illness, i.e. the notion that psychiatric disease is mainly or entirely psychogenic is not a part of biological psychiatry.
3. There exists at least prima facie evidence that psychiatric illness has a biological basis and Szasz either ignores this evidence or attempts to insulate his argument from such evidence by effectively claiming that "no true mental illness has a biological basis." Shorter cites hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis (HPA) dysregulation, a positive dexamethasone suppression test result, and shortened rapid eye movement sleep latency in those with melancholic depression as examples of this evidence. Further examples cited by Shorter include the responsiveness of catatonia to barbiturates and benzodiazepines.

• Giorgio Antonucci
• Vladimir Bukovsky
• Henry Zvi Lothane
• Jeffrey Schaler
• Edward Snowden
• Jacob Sullum
• Phil Zimmermann
• Richard E. Vatz

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