Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America

by Thomas Szasz

In recent decades, American medicine has become increasingly politicized and politics has become increasingly medicalized. Behaviors previously seen as virtuous or wicked, wise or unwise are now dealt with as healthy or sick--unwanted behaviors to be controlled as if they were health issues. The modern penchant for transforming human problems into diseases and judicial sanctions into treatments, replacing the rule of law with the rule of medical discretion, leads to the creation of a type of government social critic Thomas Szasz calls pharmacracy.

Medicalizing troublesome behaviors and social problems is tempting to voters and politicians it panders to the people by promising to satisfy their needs for dependence on medical authority and offers easy self-aggrandizement to politicians as the dispensers of more and better health care. Thus, the people gain a convenient scapegoat, enabling them to avoid personal responsibility for their behavior. The government gains a rationale for endless and politically expedient wars against social problems defined as public health emergencies. The health care system gains prestige, funding, and bureaucratic power that only an alliance with the political system can provide.

However, Szasz warns, the creeping substitution of pharmacracy for democracy--private medical concerns increasingly perceived as requiring a political response--inexorably erodes personal freedom and dignity. Medicine and Politics in America is a clear and convincing presentation of this hidden danger, all too often ignored in our health care debates and avoided in our political contests.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, History, American, Psychology

240 pages, Hardcover

First published April 30, 2001

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

[Natali · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book sure aged well. Szasz warned that we would sacrifice personal liberty by expanding the power of government healthcare and refusing limits on the definition of mental illness. He also warned that this would infantilize an entire population while concentrating power in the government.

He gives a history of medicine and disease to start with that’s fascinating and then shows how it went awry with government intervention. Did you know psychiatric doctors were the first doctors to be paid by the state? Telling, right?

There is precedence here. He writes: “The truth is that the Nazi health ideology closely resembles the American health ideology. Each rests on the same premises-that the individual is incompetent to protect himself from himself and needs the protection of the paternalistic state, thus turning private health into public health.”

He does a great job making this point. I’m sure the pandemic would have been a big “I told you so” moment for him were he still alive.

[Amanda-Has-A-Bookcase · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this up from a rec by Natalie Morris (redacted) a wealth of info. I got halfway through before having to send it back to the library.

[John Hancock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent. https://psychiatricsurvivors.wordpres...