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Thomas Szasz
Liberation by Oppression
A Comparative Study of Slavery and Psychiatry
Transaction Publishers, 2002.
See Review of this book.
Originally called mad-doctoring, psychiatry began in the seventeenth century with the establishing of madhouses and the legal empowering of doctors to incarcerate persons denominated as insane. Until the end of the nineteenth century, every relationship between psychiatrist and patient was based on domination and coercion, as between master and slave. Psychiatry, its emblem the state mental hospital, was a part of the public sphere, the sphere of coercion.
The advent of private psychotherapy, at the end of the nineteenth century, split psychiatry in two: some patients continued to be the involuntary inmates of state hospitals; others became the voluntary patients of privately practicing psychotherapists. Psychotherapy was officially defined as a type of medical treatment, but actually was a secular-medical version of the cure of souls. Relationships between therapist and patient, Thomas Szasz argues, was based on cooperation and contract, as is relationships between employer and employee, or, between clergyman and parishioner. Psychotherapy, its emblem the therapist's office, was a part of the private sphere, the contract.
Through most of the twentieth century, psychiatry was a house divided--half-slave, and half-free. During the past few decades, psychiatry became united again: all relations between psychiatrists and patients, regardless of the nature of the interaction between them, are now based on actual or potential coercion. This situation is the result of two major "reforms" that deprive therapist and patient alike of the freedom to contract with one another: Therapists now have a double duty: they must protect all mental patients--involuntary and voluntary, hospitalized or outpatient, incompetent or competent--from themselves. They must also protect the public from all patients.
Persons designated as mental patients may be exempted from responsibility for the deleterious consequences of their own behavior if it is attributed to mental illness. The radical differences between the coercive character of mental hospital practices in the public sphere, and the consensual character of psychotherapeutic practices in the private sphere, are thus destroyed. At the same time, as the scope of psychiatric coercion expands from the mental hospital to the psychiatrist's office, its reach extends into every part of society, from early childhood to old age.
"Every defender of the therapeutic state should be strapped down and made to answer the questions Dr. Szasz poses about the psychiatric industry's mission creep."
--Mick Hume, columnist, The Times, London
"In 1961 psychiatrist Thomas Szasz published The Myth of Mental Illness, boldly stating that psychiatry was an extralegal pseudoscience whose real purpose was to help authorities control the behavior of American citizens. A decade later he expanded his ideas in The Manufacture of Madness to make a point by point comparison between America's mental health movement and the Catholic Inquisition. Now, four decades after his seminal work, Dr. Szasz has compared psychiatry with America's peculiar homegrown institution of racial slavery. His comparison ignites sparks of recognition that slavery has not died in America; it has only replaced the concept of race with that of mental illness. . . . [I]n Szasz we have found our William Lloyd Garrison, and in his work we hear again the echoes of Garrison's newspaper The Liberator and its clarion call for immediate emancipation."
--Keith Hoeller, editor, Review of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry
"After decades of writing scores of books and hundreds of articles, a book by Tom Szasz still offers new territory to be plowed. Repeatedly, Szasz's penchant for recognizing paradox informs his analysis of the prevailing master-slave relationship between psychiatry and its clientele, from this work's title to observations such as 'the threat of psychiatric coercion is often the precipitating cause of assault, murder and suicide,' to countless others. It is no exaggeration to say that Liberation by Oppression is another Szaszian iconoclastic masterpiece."
--Richard E. Vatz, professor, MCOM/COMM, Towson University and associate psychology editor, USA Today Magazine
"In likening the mental patient to the slave, Thomas Szasz remains the master of the telling analogy. This is a great book--guaranteed to agitate. How placid my life would have been had I not run into Thomas Szasz!"
--Sheldon Richman, editor, Ideas on Liberty
"In his latest book, Thomas Szasz, the prolific freedom fighter against coercive psychiatry, strikes out again against those who claim to liberate by subordination. As he has done before, Dr. Szasz analogizes being a mental patient to being a slave. He uses a number of illustrations to point to the debilitating features of what is claimed to be treatment or social protection. Each chapter approaches the issue from a different perspective but with a common conclusion. As always, he makes the reader see the dark side of something accepted as benevolent by conventional wisdom."
--George J. Alexander, Institute of International and Comparative Law
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Purchase book here:
Liberation by Oppression: A Comparative Study of Slavery and Psychiatry
Other books by Thomas Szasz:
 
Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America
 
Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted
 
Fatal Freedom: The Ethics and Politics of Suicide
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