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Title: Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America by Thomas Szasz ISBN: 0-275-97196-1 Publisher: Praeger Publishers Pub. Date: July, 2001 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (4 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The Politics of Medicine
Comment: This is a great book for laying to rest some orthodox but wrong ideas about our mental health. Szasz shows us that the orthodox way is not necessarily the right way. Certainly our own doctors are not going to blow the whistle on themselves, are they? This revolutionary psychiatrist shows us the real path to health, pointing us away from the wrong direction that the pharmaceutical companies have been leading us, and unfortunately, leading our doctors as well. It's a case of the fox guarding the henhouse.
Do you care that a psychiatrist is a doctor who prescribes drugs to change people's brains without ever actually examining those people's brains? Do you worry that nobody knows exactly what the long-term effect of these drugs are that we are now being given for bi-polar disorder, for attention deficit disorder, for depression or for anxiety; or even if they are really doing us more harm than good? Do you know how doctors today are becoming more and more controlled and subverted by the pharmaceutical industry? Do you think that unwanted behavior and unwanted feelings like anxiety and depression are diseases that can be cured by drugs? If you do, you should read the latest book by this world renowned psychiatrist.
"Psychiatrists have a long history of systematically validating fake diseases as real diseases, and getting away with it," says Szasz. They can get away with it because it serves everybody: the family whose medical insurance will pay only for certain diagnoses and not for others; the government officials who can allocate more and more federal funds for their universities and laboratories; and the doctors who can service many more patients in the "service station" atmosphere that has us all believing that everything can be made right with the right pill. The only person whom fake diagnoses and powerful drugs are not serving is the health of the individual who is having his birthright sold for a pharmaceutical mess of pottage.
We are confusing, warns Szasz, bodily diseases which are physiochemical phenomena located in the body and understood by cellular pathology with unwanted personal habits or behaviors which are located in the social context of society and understood by the interconnecting relationships. We are confusing the mind with the brain. And finally, we are confusing medicine with politics and social agenda. In so doing we are becoming less and less the land of the free and the brave and more and more the land of the mentally ill and deluded. Szasz makes a good case for a new look at the insidious subversion of our medical care by the politics of pharmaceutical managed care.
Rating: 5
Summary: this book could save your life
Comment: Pharmacracy
Do you care that a psychiatrist is a doctor who prescribes drugs to change people's brains without ever actually examining those people's brains? Do you worry that nobody knows exactly what the long-term effect of these drugs are that we are now being given for bi-polar disorder, for attention deficit disorder, for depression or for anxiety; or even if they are really doing us more harm than good? Do you know how doctors today are becoming more and more controlled and subverted by the pharmaceutical industry? Are unwanted behavior and unwanted feelings like anxiety and depression diseases that can be cured by drugs? If you think they are, please run as fast as you can and get this book. It could save your life.
Rating: 5
Summary: Why Szasz' criticism of psychiatry is correct today.
Comment: This is one of the best books Szasz has written up to date. One of its most important points is his answer to the claim that biologic psychiatry, imaging tecniques and so on have proved that mental illness is an organic illness. It could not be so since in spite of cute pictures of synapses and neurotransmitters in Psichiatry manuals, what psychiatrists really DO is to jugde behaviors, ideas and social situations, attaching their labels not to any physical condition discovered by imaging tecniques but to persons who display or are considered to display those -indeed- "problems in living".
He rigorously delves into the question of what disease, illness or disorder really is. The growing army of "mental health professionals" hate to pose that question. When forced to answer their stataments are ambiguous and elusive.
The questions raised not only by this book but by the whole of Szasz's important work are crucial for contemporary man. Some ideas, behaviors, social situacions are covertly forbidden. Then, there is less room for freedom than it seems to be. To take some substances, kill oneself, engage in certain religious activities -"sects"-, sexual acts, etc. is prohibited by calling those "diseases" and precluding any chance of legitimate debate. Some are not content leaving people alone when they engage in actions that concern only themselves or others who consent in voluntary exchanges, even is it harms them according to OUR views. But the right to make the wrong choice IS freedom, as it is the need of bearing its consequences,on health, reputation or financial status. That is why some patients do not care much for Ssasz' criticisms. As long as psychiatrists wear white robes and are doctors we are not permitted even to discuss those topics, lest this in itself could be a symptom of some illness -from the incredible list in the DSM IV-. But is this science or morality of even religion in disguise?
This book is important, first for the "mental health professionals" who have heard of Szasz work and believe that it is overcome by recent developments. They should ponder upon it, even if they are not able to set up a private practice with voluntary clients like any other professional, for the sake of their conscience. Second, possible patients must be aware that their strategy -taking the role of a mental patient- can be deleterious for their social and even physical well-being. And any person who tries to understand the world in which he or she lives must read Szasz, who is a sage of our day. "Phamacratic" ideology blurrs the contours of real problems which dimension is moral, and not scientific.
Szasz' premise is that each individual is the best judge of his or her interest. Others think that coercion, fraud and lies are good procedures to save people from themselves. I quote from a horror movie of Vicent Price: "Here thousands of men and women were tortured and killed... to save their souls" (in a torture chamber of the Inquisition).
"Pharmacratic" ideology betrays basic Western values, and does it successfully decked out in "scientific" attire. One of Szasz' most important teachings has been to distinguish between science as such an ritual and pseudoreligions claiming to be "science". Bad news for orthodox psychiatry: Szasz is still standing and his arguments have sharpened their subtlety, scope and comprehensiveness.
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