Medicalization of Everyday Life: Selected Essays

by Thomas Szasz

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Author: Thomas Szasz

Publisher: Syracuse University Press

Paperback:
ISBN 10: 0815608675
ISBN 13: 978-0815608677

This collection of impassioned essays, published between 1973 and 2006, chronicles Thomas Szasz’s long campaign against the orthodoxies of “pharmacracy,” that is, the alliance of medicine and the state. From “Diagnoses Are Not Diseases” to “The Existential Identity Thief,” “Fatal Temptation,” and “Killing as Therapy,” the book delves into the complex evolution of medicalization, concluding with “Pharmacracy: The New Despotism.” In practice, society must draw a line between what counts as medical practice and what does not. Where it draws that line goes far in defining the kinds of laws its citizens live under, the kinds of medical care they receive, and the kinds of lives they are allowed to live.

From Publishers Weekly

Psychiatrist Szasz, professor emeritus at SUNY Upstate Medical University, continues his iconoclastic career in this short book of essays (previously published in journals) spanning much of his professional life. He details how the medical and legal systems have combined to form a new type of government: the pharmacracy. Examples include improving public health through coercive paternalism (read: bans on smoking and transfat). This, Szasz states, is a crime, and psychiatry is the prima facie culprit, a structure built on oppression. Szasz reiterates his longstanding idea that mental illness is not a disease and drugs cannot treat the mind, which is an abstraction, not a physical entity. Szasz is principally concerned with the individual's freedom from the state. In Killing as Therapy: The Case of Terri Schiavo, he asserts that the withdrawal of life support from Schiavo was emblematic of doctors waging a war on autonomy (since Schiavo's own desire in the matter was not known). But all is not tirade; Szasz can be subtly humorous: Being officially nuts is like being officially heretical or un-American, not like being infected with malaria. This is a wonderful, impassioned book that is, considering the recent media attention to psychopharmaceuticals, a welcome investigation of the social ramifications involved. (Oct.)
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Review

No one has exposed the oppressive medicalization of human conflict and politicization of medicine as thoroughly and radically as Thomas Szasz. With this superb collection, the essence of Szasz’s case against the Therapeutic State is now accessible to everyone. Liberty and autonomy have their most able defender in Thomas Szasz. (Sheldon Richman, Editor, The Freeman)

It takes an iconoclast with temerity and acumen to illuminate how unexamined myths and metaphors insidiously determine prevailing norms―norms considered unassailable and sacrosanct by the established medical/legal system. For decades, Thomas Szasz has publicly challenged the excesses that obscure reason. The Medicalization of Everyday Life offers a no-nonsense perspective on contemporary dogma. Required reading for all professionals in health care fields, and all those who are subject to their unwitting prejudices. (Jeffrey K. Zeig, Director, The Milton Erickson Foundation)

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Medicalization of Everyday Life: Selected Essays