Mental Illness: From Shame: Most Popular

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to Pride NEW ON AMAZON!
by Thomas S. Szasz
These are the books that

kick-started the libertarian
      movement after WWII.
I n the nineteenth century people were ashamed and embarrassed

by their mentally ill relatives. This was especially true for parents
who had a mentally ill child and for adult children who had a parent GET IT FOR KINDLE
incarcerated in an insane asylum. Today, such persons take pride in
having a mentally ill "loved one," make a career of speaking and
writing about his "illness," and fight for his "right to treatment."
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The attitude of journalists, writers, and social commentators toward
psychiatry underwent an analogous transformation. In the nineteenth
century they were critical of psychiatrists who locked up innocent
people in insane asylums and excused criminals as mentally ill. Now
they view and admire them as scientifically enlightened, caring
doctors.
How and why did this change come about? One impetus for this
transformation-which psychiatrists call the "remedicalization of Economics in One Day
psychiatry"-was the publication, in 1961, of my book The Myth of Learn about scarcity, prosperity,
Mental Illness and Erving Goffman’s book Asylums. Another was values, cooperation, character,
the fleeting interest of a few lawyers, stimulated by these books, in markets, spontaneous order, and
freeing mental patients from their psychiatric life sentences. (Sadly, entrepreneurship. You'll see the
these "civil rights" zealots were more interested in promoting profound effect of free markets on
themselves than in protecting liberty and responsibility, and showed our standard of living across the
no interest in opposing the insanity defense.) globe and over hundreds of years.
These assaults on psychiatry as a medical specialty and on

involuntary mental hospitalization as a species of preventive FREE COURSE
detention made psychiatrists close ranks and launch a well-organized
and highly effective counteroffensive. The psychiatric defense of
mental illness as brain disease and of psychiatric deprivation of
liberty as medical treatment comprised several mutually reinforcing
measures. One was the creation of a group of chemicals dubbed
"antipsychotics," a term intended to resonate with the term
"antibiotics." These chemical straitjackets were successfully sold to Follow FEE on
the public and the press-though not to involuntary patients-as Flipboard
"miracle drugs."
The psychiatrists’ second line of defense was equally inspired. State Flipboard Articles
mental hospitals had acquired a bad name. Keeping persons
"hospitalized" for years and decades did not conform to the image of
how real doctors use hospitals. With wages rising sharply after the
1950s, the cost of such prolonged hospitalization was also becoming
burdensome to the states. The solution was to "discharge" the
hundreds of thousands of chronic mental patients, attribute their
forcible expulsion to the therapeutic effectiveness of "psychiatric
Follow FEE on Medium
miracle drugs," and call the eviction "deinstitutionalization." The
enterprise was a fraud from beginning to end. But it looked like the
"right thing to do," just as formerly the chronic hospitalization of
Medium Articles
mental patients looked that way.
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Still another important element of remedicalization consisted of
sanitizing the psychiatric vocabulary. The classic diagnoses of
hysteria, neurosis, and homosexuality were declared to be
nondiseases and were quickly forgotten. So-called "severe" mental Support
diseases were authoritatively declared to be "brain diseases," a claim Foundation for
supported by the invention of a new neurochemistry (in fact, a Economic Education.
neuromythology) and the popularization of the view that such When you shop at smile.amazon.com,
illnesses are due to "chemical imbalances in the brain." Amazon donates.
Significant as these developments were, perhaps the single most

important impetus for the change I am describing was the formation
of a new social organization and political lobby, the National Alliance
for the Mentally Ill, or NAMI.
NAMI
The NAMI website describes the organization as follows: "NAMI is

dedicated to the eradication of mental illnesses and to the
improvement of the quality of life of all whose lives are affected by
these diseases. . . . Founded in 1979, NAMI has more than 210,000
members who seek equitable services for people with severe mental
illnesses, which are known to be physical brain disorders."
The NAMI rhetoric conceals that the organization is composed of,

and controlled by, principally the relatives of so-called mentally ill
persons and that its main purpose is to justify depriving such persons
of liberty in the name of mental health. So convinced is NAMI of
the nobility of its cause that its website once offered this scenario:
“ Sometime, during the course of your loved one’s illness,

you may need the police. By preparing now, before you need
help, you can make the day you need help go much more
smoothly. . . . It is often difficult to get 911 to respond to your
calls if you need someone to come & take your MI relation to a
hospital emergency room (ER). They may not believe that you
really need help. And if they do send the police, the police are
often reluctant to take someone for involuntary commitment.
That is because cops are concerned about liability. . . . When
calling 911, the best way to get quick action is to say, "Violent
EDP," or "Suicidal EDP." EDP stands for Emotionally
Disturbed Person. This shows the operator that you know what
you’re talking about. Describe the danger very specifically.
"He’s a danger to himself" is not as good as "This morning my
son said he was going to jump off the roof." . . . Also, give past
history of violence. This is especially important if the person is
not acting up. . . . When the police come, they need compelling
evidence that the person is a danger to self or others before they
can involuntarily take him or her to the ER for evaluation. . . .
Realize that you & the cops are at cross purposes. You want
them to take someone to the hospital. They don’t want to do it.
. . . Say, "Officer, I understand your reluctance. Let me spell
out for you the problems & the danger." . . . While AMI / FAMI
is not suggesting you do this, the fact is that some families have
learned to "turn over the furniture" before calling the police.
Many police require individuals with neurobiological disorders to
be imminently dangerous before treating the person against their
will. If the police see furniture disturbed they will usually
conclude that the person is imminently dangerous.
(This material is no longer posted at the national NAMI site. But it

can be found linked from the Athens, Ohio, NAMI site at
www.seorf.ohiou.edu/~xx091/911calls.html.)
Giving false information to the police is a felony. Except, it seems,

when the falsehood serves the avowed aim of providing mental
health treatment for a "loved one."
Am I tilting at windmills? How important is involuntary mental

hospitalization in our age of deinstitutionalization, when mental
illnesses are said to be brain diseases like Parkinsonism, and forced
psychiatric confinement is considered an anachronism? The
authoritative text, Mental Health and Law: Research, Policy, and
Services, edited by Bruce D. Sales and Saleem A. Shah, published
in 1996, states: "Each year in the United States well over one million
persons are civilly committed to hospitals for psychiatric treatment."
Quod erat demonstrandum.
Thomas Szasz is professor of psychiatry emeritus at SUNY Upstate

Medical University in Syracuse. His latest book is Liberation by
Oppression: A Comparative Study of Slavery and Psychiatry
(Transaction, 2002).

Thomas S. Szasz
D r. Thomas Szasz (1920-2012) was a

Psychiatrist, academic, and champion of
individual rights. He devoted much of his life to campaigning against
many aspects of conventional psychiatry, in particular involuntary
psychiatric treatment and commitment.
     
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Friday, November 01, 2002

Mental Illness: From Shame {{article.title}}

Save web pages as PDF manually or automatically w ith PDFmyURL

These are the books that

I n the nineteenth century people were ashamed and embarrassed

These assaults on psychiatry as a medical specialty and on

Significant as these developments were, perhaps the single most

The NAMI website describes the organization as follows: "NAMI is

The NAMI rhetoric conceals that the organization is composed of,

“ Sometime, during the course of your loved one’s illness,

(This material is no longer posted at the national NAMI site. But it

Giving false information to the police is a felony. Except, it seems,

Am I tilting at windmills? How important is involuntary mental

Quod erat demonstrandum.

Thomas Szasz is professor of psychiatry emeritus at SUNY Upstate

Save web pages as PDF manually or automatically w ith PDFmyURL

D r. Thomas Szasz (1920-2012) was a

Save web pages as PDF manually or automatically w ith PDFmyURL

About Contact Submissions

Save web pages as PDF manually or automatically w ith PDFmyURL

Save web pages as PDF manually or automatically w ith PDFmyURL

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