Thomas Szasz (1920-2012) maintained that, unlike true diseases of the brain and body, mental illness is a destructive social construct that medicalizes living and deprives people of their dignity. According to Szasz, medication, hospitalization and mandated psychotherapy are little more than coercive, dignity-reducing forms of clinical practice. You will be jarred away from comfortable notions to embrace deeper psychiatric and social justice issues underscoring your clinical practice.
Many people value security and submission over uncertainty and responsibility. For our clients, this means abdicating control over their lives to the authority of their symptoms and doctors; while for clinicians it compels belief in mental illness as a disease to be cured. Dr. Szasz will challenge you to open deeper conversations with your clients around freedom and to question the potentially coercive nature inherent in psychotherapy and psychopharmacology.
True freedom means taking control of and responsibility for our choices and their consequences. Neither psychotherapy, drugs, nor the power of our techniques will restore a client’s personal sense of agency. Szasz will cause you to feel uncomfortable enough to think differently about everything you do clinically, from diagnosis to treatment planning, especially with the most vulnerable—children, the imprisoned and the so-called mentally ill. Szasz’s ideas were highly controversial during his lifetime, and they continue to fuel critical discourse around topics as seemingly divergent as the DSM and legalization of drugs.
