The Age of Madness: The History of Involuntary Mental Hospitalization, Presented in Selected Texts

by Thomas Szasz

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385046383
• ISBN13: 9780385046381
• Release Date: January 1973
• Publisher: Anchor Books
• Length: 372 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.

Customer Reviews

what's in a definition?

This is a collection of short epigram-like quips from one of the enfants terribles of modern psychiatry. Szasz has noticed, like Laing before him and Foucault later on, that language has a terrifying power to define, isolate, constrain and control. The politics of power includes the definition of what is sane -ie, of who is allowed to participate in the society and who is to be denied this participation. This power has conferred upon the psychiatric profession a tremendous burden of responsibility, which, according to S., is often not shouldered with integrity. Prescribing Ritalin to millions of active children, criminalizing some drugs (but not others peddled by powerful and rich lobbies), institutionalizing people who in indigenous societies would be allowed to participate in the community... is often ethically suspect and philosophically questionable. To Szasz, forcing patients into treatment against their will is nothing short of mental rape. Most psychiatrists get away with peddling drugs to children simply because this is the only game in town, and they are determined to keep it this way. "When the psychiatrist approves of a person's actions, he judges that person to have acted with 'free choice'; when he dissaproves, he judges him to have acted without 'free choice'." The language used to define sanity becomes a tool through which psychiatry both insulates itself and assumes control. Psychiatrists use, according to Szasz, 'ready-made phrases' whose function is to 'anesthetize the brain'. Defining people as ,insane', 'deperssed' etc is a semantic hammer that can destroy the subject's dignity and respectability as effectively as cracking his/her skull. This dehumanized language ceases to see a schizophrenic patient as a human being, denies him/her the ability for self-control and self-determination, defining them in a way that makes them invisible to themselves. While Szasz keeps pointing out contradictions and taken-for-granted attitudes in his field, he does not have any real answers. I find interesting Szasz's observation that addiction (smoking, drinking, shooting heroin, etc) is "part of an internally significant dramatic production in which the 'patient-victim' is the star. So long as it is, the person will find it difficult or impossible to give up his habit; whereas once he has decided to close down this play and leave the stage, he will find the grip of the habit broken and will cure himself of 'addiction' with surprising ease." The history of psychiatry, as recorded by psychiatrists and medical historians, proceeds according to S. from a faulty basic premise: that the institutional psychiatrist helps and heals the involuntary (i.e., non-paying) patient. As a result, the patient loses control over his relationship with the expert, and over his basic dignity as a human being. One problem is that the institutional (or hired) psychiatrist is a bureaucratic employee, paid for his services by private/public organizations (HMOs, et