Psychiatry: The Science of Lies - Audiobook - Thomas Szasz

"Thomas Szasz is the preeminent critic of psychiatry within the world.”—Richard Vatz, TowsonUniversity “Psychiatry: The Science of Lies makes an irresistible case that some thing is rotten in the institution of psychiatry. Thomas Szasz, the John Brown of psychiatric abolitionism, lays bare psychiatry’s deceptions with exquisitely chosen examples and powerfully eloquent arguments. He may start a new civil war—between moral responsibility and bogus science.”—David Ramsay Steele, author of Atheism Explained: From Folly to Philosophy “It is as one expects a blistering critique of psychiatric practice as a form of ideological mischievousness….On 1 point, for me the key point, there can be no doubt: the extraordinary faith of Szasz within the decencies of sufferers and their rights to the democratic tradition of which he speaks and to which they as citizens are entitled.”—Irving Louis Horowitz, RutgersUniversity

For more than half a century, Thomas Szasz has devoted much of his career to a radical critique of psychiatry. His latest operate, Psychiatry: The Science of Lies, is really a culmination of his life’s work: to portray the integral role of deception in the history and practice of psychiatry. Szasz argues that the diagnosis and therapy of mental illness stands within the exact same relationship to the diagnosis and treatment of bodily sickness that the forgery of a painting does towards the original masterpiece.

Art historians and also the legal system seek to distinguish forgeries from originals. Those concerned with medicine, on the other hand—physicians, patients, politicians, health-insurance providers, and legal professionals—take the opposite stance when faced with the challenge of distinguishing everyday problems in living from bodily illnesses, systematically authenticating non-diseases as illnesses. The boundary between disease and non-disease—genuine and imitation, truth and falsehood—thus becomes arbitrary and uncertain.

There's neither glory nor profit in correctly demarcating what counts as medical illness and medical healing from what does not. People and families wishing to protect themselves from medically and politically authenticated charlatanry are left to their own intellectual and moral resources to make critical decisions about human dilemmas miscategorized as “mental diseases” and about medicalized responses misidentified as “psychiatric treatments.”

Delivering his sophisticated analysis in lucid prose and with a sharp wit, Szasz continues to engage and challenge readers of all backgrounds. Thomas Szasz is professor emeritus of psychiatry at the State University of New York’s UpstateMedicalUniversity in Syracuse, New York. His several books consist of The Manufacture of Madness, Ideology and Insanity, Ceremonial Chemistry, The Myth of Psychotherapy, Pharmacracy, and Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry.

From: http://ping.fm/fHDb0