Product Description: The vast literature on Virginia Woolf's life, work, and marriage falls into two groups. A large majority is certain that she was mentally ill, and a small minority is equally certain that she was not mentally ill but was misdiagnosed by psychiatrists...read more

Product Description: This intriguing book undercuts everything you thought you knew about psychotherapy. Until recent years, ''bad'' and ''immoral'' were the terms used to describe people who are now referred to as ''sick'' and ''in need of treatment...read more

Product Description: In Western thought, suicide has evolved from sin to sin–and–crime, to crime, to mental illness, and to semilegal act. A legal act is one we are free to think and speak about and plan and perform, without penalty by agents of the state...read more

Product Description: For more than half a century Thomas Szasz has devoted much of his career to a radical critique of psychiatry. His latest work, Psychiatry: The Science of Lies, is a culmination of his life's work: to portray the integral role of deception in the history and practice of psychiatry...read more

Product Description: For more than half a century Thomas Szasz has devoted much of his career to a radical critique of psychiatry. His latest work, Psychiatry: The Science of Lies, is a culmination of his life's work: to portray the integral role of deception in the history and practice of psychiatry...read more

Product Description: More than fifty years ago, Thomas Szasz showed that the concept of mentalillness-a disease of the mind-is an oxymoron, a metaphor, a myth.Disease, in the medical sense, affects only the body. He also demonstratedthat civil commitment and the insanity defense, the paradigmatic practicesof psychiatry, are incompatible with the political values of personal responsibilityand individual liberty...read more

Understanding the history of psychiatry requires an accurate view of its function and purpose. In this provocative new study, Szasz challenges conventional beliefs about psychiatry. He asserts that, in fact, psychiatrists are not concerned with the diagnosis and treatment of bona fide illnesses. Psychiatric tradition, social expectation, and the law make it clear that coercion is the profession's determining characteristic. Psychiatrists may "diagnose" or "treat" people without their consent or even against their clearly expressed wishes, and these involuntary psychiatric interventions are as different as are sexual relations between consenting adults and the sexual violence we call "rape." But the point is not merely the difference between coerced and consensual psychiatry, but to contrast them. The term "psychiatry" ought to be applied to one or the other, but not both. As long as psychiatrists and society refuse to recognize this, there can be no real psychiatric historiography. The coercive character of psychiatry was more apparent in the past than it is now. Then, insanity was synonymous with unfitness for liberty. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a new type of psychiatric relationship developed, when people experiencing so-called "nervous symptoms," sought help. This led to a distinction between two kinds of mental diseases: neuroses and psychoses. Persons who complained about their own behavior were classified as neurotic, whereas persons about whose behavior others complained were classified as psychotic. The legal, medical, psychiatric, and social denial of this simple distinction and its far-reaching implications undergirds the house of cards that is modern psychiatry. Coercion as Cure is the most important book by Szasz since his landmark The Myth of Mental Illness.

Product Description: The human mind abhors the absence of explanation, but full understanding is never possible. Human understanding is likely to be incomplete at best and, more often, utterly fallacious. To make matters worse, it is likely to be supported as truth and wisdom by religious and scientific authority, intellectual fashion and social convention...read more

Product Description: Thomas Szasz suggests that governments have overstepped their bounds in labeling and prohibiting certain drugs as "dangerous" substances and incarcerating drug "addicts" in order to cure them. Szasz asserts that such policies scapegoat illegal drugs and the persons who use and sell them, and discourage the breaking of drug habits by pathologizing drug use as "addiction...read more

Product Description: The modern penchant for transforming human problems into "diseases" and judicial sanctions into "treatments," replacing the rule of law with the rule of medical discretion, leads to a type of government social critic Thomas Szasz calls "pharmacracy...read more

Thomas Szasz is renowned for his critical exploration of the literal language of psychiatry and his rejection of officially sanctioned definitions of mental illness. His work has initiated a continuing debate in the psychiatric community whose essence is often misunderstood. Szasz's critique of the established view of mental illness is rooted in an insistent distinction between disease and behavior. In his view, psychiatrists have misapplied the vocabulary of disease as metaphorical figures to denote a range of deviant behaviors from the merely eccentric to the criminal. In A Lexicon of Lunacy, Szasz extends his analysis of psychiatric language to show how its misuse has resulted in a medicalized view of life that denies the reality of free will and responsibility. Szasz documents the extraordinary extent to which modern diagnosis of mental illness is subject to shifting social attitudes and values. He shows how economic, personal, legal, and political factors have come to play an increasingly powerful role in the diagnostic process, with consequences of blurring the distinction between cultural and scientific standards. Broadened definitions of mental illness have had a corrosive effect on the criminal justice system in undercutting traditional conceptions of criminal behavior and have encouraged state-sanctioned coercive interventions that bestow special privileges (and impose special hardships) on persons diagnosed as mentally ill. Lucidly written and powerfully argued, and now available in paperback, this provocative and challenging volume will be of interest to psychologists, criminologists, and sociologists.

Product Description: In this brilliantly original and highly accessible work, Thomas Szasz demonstrates the futility of analyzing the mind as a collection of brain functions.

Product Description: In this thoughtful and compelling analysis, the world's foremost critic of coercions of the psychiatric institution defends a patient's right to choose life or death.

Product Description: Una de las cuestiones más problemáticas a las que nos enfrentamos hoy en día es quién debe determinar cuándo y cómo morimos. Libertad fatal es una elocuente defensa del derecho de cada individuo a elegir una muerte voluntaria...read more

Product Description: Rare book: Price in USD

Product Description: In this short work, Dr. Szasz takes aim at conventional psychiatry, and at the attendent system of courts, hospitals, and psychiatrists who confine patients against their will. The focal point is a Supreme Court case involving a man forcibly committed to a Florida asylum for 14 years...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

The renowned gadfly of psychiatry examines the growing practice of coercing individuals (especially adults economically dependent on others) allegedly in their own best interest. Demonstrates how moral man has been replaced by mental patient in modern society, how sin has been converted to mental illness as a way of controlling undesirables. Deals with psychiatry as a social control medium, how it disposes of those persons unwanted by society, and presents a compelling argument for limiting coercive powers of psychiatry to take away people's personal freedom and relieve them of their personal responsibility. (view table of contents)

Product Description: In this seminal work, Dr. Szasz examines the similarities between the Inquisition and institutional psychiatry. His purpose is to show "that the belief in mental illness and the social actions to which it leads have the same moral implications and political consequences as had the belief in witchcraft and the social actions to which it led...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

The noted psychiatrist challenges established scientific and social definitions of insanity, redefining the concept in relation to bodily illness, social deviance, and the sick role (view table of contents)

Argues that in making drug use illegal American's have given up their rights to property, and discusses the history of drug legislation and the message it sends out

Product Description: Nineteen essays on political philosophy, policy analysis, and book and music reviews, reveal the multifaceted mind of the man who knew everyone in the libertarian movement, learned from everyone, and was mentor to scores of young (and not-so-young) scholars and professional libertarians...read more

Product Description: For St Augustine, sexual desire was a disease; to the great doctors of coitus today, lack of sexual desire is a disease. For Dr Szasz, both these presumptions are absurd and unscientific. He argues persuasively that human sexuality - however it may be expressed - reveals and reflects who we are and who we want to be...read more