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Title: The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (Revised Edition) by Thomas S. Szasz ISBN: 0-06-091151-4 Publisher: Quill Pub. Date: 10 November, 1984 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3 (16 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: "The Myth of Mental Illness" is not Szasz's magnum opus.
Comment: Though this book might be of paramount importance for those who desire to find an antithetical position to the "Doctors for the pathologizing of human behavior," I think it a terrible mistake to read this book with the assumption that understanding Szasz will be the result. Written early in his career, this book, like Beethoven's early symphonies, deserves not the attention it receives for the titilating title. I believe the influence of Karl Kraus caused the about face demonstrated by "The Myth of Psychotherapy" from the position outlined in "The Ethics of Psychoanalysis," both books he published later. For those that desire to find a summation of Szasz in one volume, I would recommend "Insanity."
Rating: 5
Summary: One of the Most Important Books in Psychiatry and Philosophy
Comment: I believe this is one of the most important books in the history of psychiatry. The book is ground-breaking and establishes a new parardigm and organizing concept for many "mind" disciplines. Dr Szasz's ideas are timeless, revolutionary and common sense - not to be contrued as a criticism. Indeed many revolutionary ideas are simple and obvious and I think that is exactly why this book and Dr Szasz must be taken seriously. I am speaking behind the times when I say this because the book is nearly 40 years on the market. However Dr Szasz is as relevant today as ever. Institutionalized persecution of "different" behaviours has evolved beyond the ridiculous to the absurd. Dr Szasz's characterization of this as a "war on personal responsibility" is important from a medical and a moral perspective, as a challenge to the popular notions of "inner child", the gowing "victim" industry (e.g. gambling and shopping "addictions", among many many more) and similiar conceptual garabage.
The Myth of Mental Illness creates for the reader a reference point for cross diciplinary thinking in sociology, linguistics, philosophy of mind and science, psychology, history and or course medicine. The concepts are true to human beings as self-responsible moral agents and consistent with the North American work-ethic. Dr Szasz is commended for his insight and understanding of a pyschiatric industry gone mad. The book should be part of Amazon's "Well Worth Reading" displays.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Myth Indeed
Comment: Descriptive criteria aside, what is the essence of mental disorders? Are they merely physiological disorders of the brain, or, more precisely of its chemistry? If so, can they be cured by restoring the balance of substances and secretions in that mysterious organ? And, once equilibrium is reinstated - is the illness "gone" or is it still lurking there, "under wraps", waiting to erupt? Are psychiatric problems inherited, rooted in faulty genes (though amplified by environmental factors) - or brought on by abusive or wrong nurturance?
These questions are the domain of the "medical" school of mental health.
Others cling to the spiritual view of the human psyche. They believe that mental ailments amount to the metaphysical discomposure of an unknown medium - the soul. Theirs is a holistic approach, taking in the patient in his or her entirety, as well as his milieu.
The members of the functional school regard mental health disorders as perturbations in the proper, statistically "normal", behaviours and manifestations of "healthy" individuals, or as dysfunctions. The "sick" individual - ill at ease with himself (ego-dystonic) or making others unhappy (deviant) - is "mended" when rendered functional again by the prevailing standards of his social and cultural frame of reference.
In a way, the three schools are akin to the trio of blind men who render disparate descriptions of the very same elephant. Still, they share not only their subject matter - but, to a counter intuitively large degree, a faulty methodology.
As the renowned anti-psychiatrist, Thomas Szasz, of the State University of New York, notes in his article "The Lying Truths of Psychiatry", mental health scholars, regardless of academic predilection, infer the etiology of mental disorders from the success or failure of treatment modalities.
This form of "reverse engineering" of scientific models is not unknown in other fields of science, nor is it unacceptable if the experiments meet the criteria of the scientific method. The theory must be all-inclusive (anamnetic), consistent, falsifiable, logically compatible, monovalent, and parsimonious. Psychological "theories" - even the "medical" ones (the role of serotonin and dopamine in mood disorders, for instance) - are usually none of these things.
The outcome is a bewildering array of ever-shifting mental health "diagnoses" expressly centred around Western civilisation and its standards (example: the ethical objection to suicide). Neurosis, a historically fundamental "condition" vanished after 1980. Homosexuality, according to the American Psychiatric Association, was a pathology prior to 1973. Seven years later, narcissism was declared a "personality disorder", almost seven decades after it was first described by Freud.
Szasz is the father of the "anti psychiatry" movement and this is his best book - a riveting, mind boggling,scholarly read. Sam Vaknin, author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited".
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Title: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement by Thomas S. Szasz ISBN: 0815604610 Publisher: Syracuse Univ Pr (Trade) Pub. Date: June, 1997 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: The Myth of Psychotherapy: Mental Healing As Religion, Rhetoric, and Repression by Thomas Szasz ISBN: 0815602235 Publisher: Syracuse Univ Pr (Trade) Pub. Date: December, 1988 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences by Thomas Stephen Szasz ISBN: 0815604602 Publisher: Syracuse Univ Pr (Trade) Pub. Date: March, 1997 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America by Thomas Szasz ISBN: 0275971961 Publisher: Praeger Publishers Pub. Date: July, 2001 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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Title: Toxic Psychiatry : Why Therapy, Empathy and Love Must Replace the Drugs, Electroshock, and Biochemical Theories of the "New Psychiatry" by Peter R. Breggin ISBN: 0312113668 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: 15 August, 1994 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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