Thomas Stephen Szasz (Hungarian: Szász Tamás István; 1920-2012) was a Hungarian-American academic and psychiatrist. He served for most of his career as professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York1. A distinguished lifetime fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a life member of the American Psychoanalytic Association, he was best known as a social critic of the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry, as what he saw as the social control aims of medicine in modern society, as well as scientism.
His books The Myth of Mental Illness (1961) and The Manufacture of Madness (1970) set out some of the arguments most associated with him2.
Szasz argued throughout his career that mental illness is a metaphor for human problems in living, and that mental illnesses are not "illnesses" in the sense that physical illnesses are, and that except for a few identifiable brain diseases, there are "neither biological or chemical tests nor biopsy or necropsy findings for verifying DSM diagnoses"3.
Szasz maintained throughout his career that he was not anti-psychiatry but was rather anti-coercive psychiatry. He was a staunch opponent of civil commitment and involuntary psychiatric treatment but believed in, and practiced, psychiatry and psychotherapy between consenting adults.
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James L. Knoll IV, MD, "In Memoriam-Thomas Stephen Szasz, MD, PsychiatricTimes.com, 13 September 2012, accessed 24 May 2024. ↩︎
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Jonathan Rosen, "Quadruplets With Schizophrenia? Researchers Were Confounded", The New York Times, 19 July 2023, accessed 24 May 2024. ↩︎
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Thomas Szasz, Psychiatry: The Science of Lies, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, New York: 2008, p. 2. ↩︎
This article is derived from the English Wikipedia article "Thomas Szasz" as of 5 May 2024, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.