- Also Known As:
- Unknown
- Year:
- 1961
- Countries:
- UK US
- Predominant Genre:
- Non-fiction
- Author:
- Thomas Szasz
- Outstanding Performances:
- None
- Premiss:
- Psychiatry consistently expands its definition of mental illness to impose its authority over morality and culture.
- Themes:
- Alienation | Compassion | Emotional repression | Guilt | Loneliness | Narcissism | Personal change | Political Correctness | Social class | Totalitarianism | White culture | White supremacy
- Similar (in Plot, Theme or Style) to:
- Unknown
- Review Format:
- Book
Psychiatrists are witch-doctors practicing pseudo-science
A crazy person is someone running away from their problems
Nothing to dislike here, since psychiatry possesses an inherent capacity for abuse that is greater than in other areas of medicine:
- Social control - without appropriate values - of those deemed socially-unacceptable;
- Projection & Displacement;
- Will to Political Power & Social Prestige;
- Valorization without merit;
- Egomania as solace for loneliness;
- Scientific deception to solace scientific mediocrity;
- Mimicking the language of physicians to make psychiatry appear a science and, thus, to gain the same prestige by impersonating real scientists;
- Claiming loneliness is caused by physical processes;
- Conflating Description with Prescription, such that the meaning of psychosocial conflict becomes its cause;
- Rejecting exogenous causes of psychosocial conflicts in favor of purely endogenous ones - pretending mental illness is organic or the result of malingering to avoid criticizing cultural causes;
- Conflating the metaphoric nature of the phrase “mental illness” for literal causes and effects in the human brain;
- The false utopianism of conflating the psychosocial with the physico‑chemical so that chemical interventions (& deliberate social stigmatization) can be utilized to control the mentally-ill rather than deal with any cultural problems their psychological conflicts indicate;
- Failing to understand that is mental illness if causes in the brain that it is, then, not a mental illness but a physical one - with mental symptoms;
The Job of the Scapegoat
The socially-useful function of acting as social tranquilizers and human sacrifices.
By taking part in important public dramas, scapegoats contribute to maintaining the stability of the existing social order.
Copyright © 2014 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute this posting in any format; provided mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.co.uk) is included. All other rights reserved.
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