Thomas Szasz, RIP - "Mental illness is a myth whose function is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations..."

"I am sorry to report that Thomas Szasz, the great libertarian critic of coercive psychiatry, the "therapeutic state," and the war on drugs, died over the weekend at his home in Manlius, New York. He was 92."

Obituary.

Link -

"What people nowadays call mental illness, especially in a legal context, is not a fact, but a strategy; not a condition, but a policy; in short it is not a disease that the alleged patient has, but a decision which those who call him mentally ill make about how to act toward him, whether he likes it or not."

Misunderstanding Szasz's ideas:

"...yet he was constantly misunderstood. How many times, for example, has someone suggested that Szasz's argument against the idea of mental illness has been refuted by research on the biological basis of schizophrenia? The implications of that research are routinely overstated, but set that aside: Even if the most breathless pop-science coverage of those investigations were accurate, they wouldn't affect Szasz's distinction between metaphorical mental diseases and actual physical lesions. They would simply move schizophrenia from the first category to the second one. Far from being unable to process such scientific developments, Szasz wrote thoughtfully about something similar that had happened in the past, when the treatment of epilepsy moved from the dominion of the psychiatrists to the dominion of the neurologists.

Meanwhile, there seems to be no limit to the medicalization of our lives..."

This:

"Szasz says the category of "mental illness" turns willed behavior into a disease, taking away both rights and responsibilities from the actor just because his actions strikes a doctor, family member, or judge as inexplicably bizarre and strange."