Schizophrenia: The Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry

by Thomas Szasz

15 years & 12 books after The Myth of Mental Illness, the Wm Buckley of social relations continues his elegant & passionate assault on psychiatry, this time zeroing in on the most vulnerable syndrome in the medical library. "Schizophrenia is not a disease," Szasz insists, only a name that fake doctors (psychiatrists) give to misbehavers who annoy their families & misfits who can't "endure life with decency & dignity." This anti-Freudian no lesion-no illness formula is familiar, but genetic approaches to the subject--& all the recent, impressive statistics--are also rejected. Even R.D. Laing & the "anti-psychiatrists" (who've stolen much of Szasz' thunder) draw ridicule--for their idealization of insanity & for attempts to treat, however benignly, "so-called" schizophrenics. The undeniable problems with the schizophrenia diagnosis--vagueness, lack of etiology, institutional abuse--receive repeated emphasis, along with nightmarish reports of (primarily Soviet) political persecution masquerading as psychiatry. Disturbing stuff, but Szasz drowns the valid controversies in hyperbole ("the greatest scientific scandal of our scientific age") & tests our patience with labored analogies: therapy as slavery or arranged marriage, schizophrenia as the psychiatric faith's Eucharist. As always, the Szasz attack is relentlessly abstract (no case histories or current asylum data) & short on compassion, yet imbued with an odd eloquence that perhaps only tunnel-vision can achieve.--Kirkus

Genres: Psychology, Mental Health, Psychiatry, Philosophy

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Thomas Stephen Szasz (pronounced /sas/; born April 15, 1920 in Budapest, Hungary) was a psychiatrist and academic. He was Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse, New York. He was a prominent figure in the antipsychiatry movement, a well-known social critic of the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry, and of the social control aims of medicine in modern society, as well as of scientism. He is well known for his books, The Myth of Mental Illness (1960) and The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement which set out some of the arguments with which he is most associated.

Reviews

[Erik Graff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Szasz is a psychiatrist who takes his medical training seriously. The basic argument of the book is that "schizophrenia", like many psychiatric disease categories, has no known etiology, no known causal agent. It is, at best, a very vague descriptive category which has proven to be variable over time, like most of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals' (DSM) nosologies. A real psychological disease would be comparable to that caused by the Triponema pallidum bacterium in its tertiary phase, viz. syphilis.

[Owlseyes]

"En otras palabras, Kraepelin y Bleuler no descubrieron las enfermedades que los hicieron famosos, sino que las inventaron"
Page 12

"El entusiasmo de Freud por patologizar la psicología —es decir, la vida misma—fue, por supuesto, desarrollado plenamente ocho años antes en su popular obra La psicopatología de la vida cotidiana (1901)"
Page 17

[Julián Gómez · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tengo sentimientos ambivalentes hacia la tesis que postula Szasz en este libro de casi 300 páginas, tesis en la que critica abiertamente las prácticas psiquiátricas referentes a la esquizofrenia a lo largo de la historia, hasta la -su- actualidad (década de los 60), así, Szasz nos llena de temas que según él tienen relación con la psiquiatría y con la práctica de la misma. Claro, hay postulados en los que estoy completamente de acuerdo, como la estigmatización de las personas esquizofrénicas -o personas con pensamientos no considerados normales bajo los estándares de la sociedad, como menciona el autor-; la intervención de la política en temas médicos y otros más, no obstante, considero que se vuelve soso estar haciendo analogías que solamente él entiende y que tienen poca relevancia con lo que se menciona en el título y en el primer capítulo de su tesis.
En fin, no hay que menospreciar los postulados de este autor de origen húngaro, pues es considerado una eminencia en cuanto a los fundamentos morales y científicos de la psiquiatría se refiere, además de ser uno de los referentes de la antipsiquiatría -incluso sin sentirse identificado con esta-.

A pesar de las 3 estrellas, recomiendo este libro para el que se quiera aventurar en la temática de las enfermedades mentales.

[Marco Sán Sán]

Meticulosa y respetuosa desarticulación de un hito que mutó en enfermedad por intereses analíticos o autoritarios, anudando diagnóstico, síntoma, atrofia, fantasía para confundiendo trastorno con enfermedad.

[John Hancock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read it.

https://psychiatricsurvivors.wordpres...