By pretending that convention is Nature, that disobeying a personal prohibition is a medical illness, they establish themselves as agents of social control and at the same time disguise their punitive interventions in the semantic and social trappings of medical practice.

Thomas Szasz

Categorized in : Practice Medical Agents

If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.

Thomas Szasz

humorous prayer depression

People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates.

Thomas Szasz

creating wisdom life

When a man says that he is Jesus or Napoleon, or that the Martians are after him, or claims something else that seems outrageous to common sense, he is labeled psychotic and locked up in a madhouse. Freedom of speech is only for normal people.

Thomas Szasz

men people jesus

Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence.

Thomas Szasz

clear courage thinking

In the past, men created witches: now they create mental patients.

Thomas Szasz

patient men past

We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility

Thomas Szasz

guilt responsibility meaningful

The plague of mankind is the fear and rejection of diversity: monotheism, monarchy, monogamy and, in our age, monomedicine. The belief that there is only one right way to live, only one right way to regulate religious, political, sexual, medical affairs is the root cause of the greatest threat to man: members of his own species, bent on ensuring his salvation, security, and sanity.

Thomas Szasz

religious roots men

We achieve active mastery over illness and death by delegating all responsibility for their management to physicians, and by exiling the sick and the dying to hospitals. But hospitals serve the convenience of staff not patients: we cannot be properly ill in a hospital, nor die in one decently; we can do so only among those who love and value us. The result is the institutionalized dehumanization of the ill, characteristic of our age.

Thomas Szasz

sick responsibility love

The neurotic has problems; the psychotic has solutions.

Thomas Szasz

neurosis psychosis doubt

The FDA calls certain substances "controlled." But there are no "controlled substances," there are only controlled citizens.

Thomas Szasz

fda citizens political

Mental illness is a myth, whose function is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations.

Thomas Szasz

pills bitter moral

Labeling a child as mentally ill is stigmatization, not diagnosis. Giving a child a psychiatric drug is poisoning, not treatment.

Thomas Szasz

drug giving children

What people really need and demand from life is not wealth, comfort, or esteem, but games worth playing

Thomas Szasz

games comfort people

The less a person knows about the workings of the social institutions in his society, the more he must trust those who wield power in it; and the more he trusts those who wield such power, the more vulnerable he makes himself to becoming their victim.

Thomas Szasz

becoming vulnerable victim

In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.

Thomas Szasz

totems kingdoms animal

Psychiatry does not commit human rights abuse. It is a human rights abuse.

Thomas Szasz

abuse rights doe

Addiction, obesity, starvation (anorexia nervosa) are political problems, not psychiatric: each condense and expresses a contest between the individual and some other person or persons in his environment over the control of the individual's body.

Thomas Szasz

anorexia addiction political

Psychiatry is probably the single most destructive force that has affected American Society within the last fifty years.

Thomas Szasz

medicine fifty years

Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.

Thomas Szasz

patience attitude happiness

Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily.

Thomas Szasz

education positive children