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 The Shame of Medicine: NEW ON AMAZON!

Celebrating Coercion
These are the books that
by Thomas S. Szasz
kick-started the libertarian
movement after WWII.

     

“C oercion is a subjective response to a particular intervention

and has been considered an unfortunate but necessary part
of the care of people with psychiatric illness.” That definition of the
State-sanctioned forcible control of innocent persons labeled
mentally ill by persons labeled psychiatrists was offered by Giles
Newton-Howes—honorary senior lecturer in the department of
psychological medicine, Imperial College London, and consultant
psychiatrist at Hawkes Bay District Health Board, Napier, New
Zealand—in the editorial in the June 2010 issue of The Psychiatrist,
a journal of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (United Kingdom).

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In contemporary English the meaning of the noun “coercion” is clear
and uncontroversial. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines
it as “the act, process, or power of coercing; . . . <a promise
obtained by coercion is never binding> . . . synonyms: arm-twisting,
force, compulsion, constraint, duress, pressure . . .; near antonyms: Featured Course
agreement, approval, consent, permission.” Coercion is emphatically
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 not the private “subjective response” of the oppressed person; it is
the objective, publicly observable action of the oppressor. According
to the authoritative Black’s Law Dictionary (Fourth Revised
Edition), the relationship between hospital psychiatrist and patient
clearly constitutes coercion: “COERCION. Compulsion; constraint;
compelling by force or arms.”

Contemporary practitioners of psychiatry, enlightened by

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over their captives. Learn about scarcity, prosperity,
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“
profound effect of free markets on
So why am I so attracted to this patient population? I’ve our standard of living across the
always been enthralled by insanity. . . . [N]ow I am the doctor globe and over hundreds of years.
in charge of Bellevue’s psychiatric emergency room. . . . I run
two fifteen-hour overnight shifts on Saturday and Sunday nights.
They call me “the weekend attending.” It feels just like rock- FREE COURSE
and-roll psychiatry to me. This is my Saturday night gig. . . .
[The police deliver a prisoner receiving methadone
detoxification.] I go inside to talk to Nancy [the nurse]. “The
cop wants dead weight, the prisoner wants methadone. Looks
like we should probably just take advantage of the situation.”
We agree to do something that everyone knows damn well is
completely against the rules. I have never done it before or Follow FEE on
since: I tell the patient we are going to give him an injection of Flipboard
methadone, and we give him Thorazine. . . . [S]ometimes down
here, the end justifies the means. This way, he calms down, the
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 cop is happy, they both leave and we can go on with our night. Flipboard Articles

The State-sanctioned forcible control of one group of innocent

persons by another group of persons authorized to control them is,
of course, as old as civilization. We call its prototype “slavery.”
Justified by religious and philosophical authorities, the supporters of
such systems of institutionalized domination-submission always felt
morally superior to those who rejected their reasoning and opposed Follow FEE on Medium
their power. Today, the system based on the same age-old
rationalizations is called “psychiatry.” I have renamed it “psychiatric
slavery.”
Medium Articles
“If slavery is not wrong,” declared Abraham Lincoln, “nothing is
wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so think, and feel.” Advertisement
Slavery is wrong because it empowers one group of persons to
deprive another group of liberty on the ground of who they are, not
of what they do. I knew very little about Lincoln when I grew up in
post-World War I Hungary. But I did recognize, as a gut feeling, that Support
if the domination of the mental patient by the psychiatrist is not Foundation for
wrong, then nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so Economic Education.
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Wrong but Necessary

Many decades later I learned about Lincoln’s more complex,

confused, and conflicted opinions about slavery, and also about the
inconsistency of libertarians’ passionate commitment to the principle
of self-ownership as a pillar of individual liberty and their penchant
to turn their gaze away from psychiatric slavery as an integral part of
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 the political-social fabric of modern Western societies.

In 1999 an editorial in the British Medical Journal warned, “The

growing pressures on them [psychiatrists] to deliver public protection
was perhaps inevitable, given the rise of biopsychomedical
paradigms as explanations for the vicissitudes of life in modern
Western society. Psychiatrists have played their part by assuming
the authority to explain, categorize, manage, and prognose in
situations where well defined disease (arguably their only clearcut
remit) was not present.”

Such warnings have not deterred prominent psychiatrists from

making brazen claims about the nature of psychiatry as a medical
specialty. In an editorial in the September 2010 issue of Current
Psychiatry, titled “Integrating Psychiatry with Other Medical
Specialties,” psychiatrist Henry A. Nasrallah—professor of
psychiatry at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine (my
alma mater)—writes, “As a specialty that deals with brain disorders,
psychiatry is now much more integrated with other medical and
surgical specialties than in the past. Psychiatry is no longer perceived
as a ‘different’ discipline. . . .” Where is the outrage at this
shameless mendacity? Nowhere.

Forgotten Human-Rights Violations

The human-rights violations of chattel slavery, colonialism, the

Inquisition, national socialism, and communism have been well
documented. Sporadic reports of the human-rights violations of

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 psychiatry abound in our newspapers and magazines. They are
quickly forgotten as exceptional “abuses.” More than 50 years ago I
set myself the task of not letting the profession and the public forget
that psychiatry—the oppression of the patient by the psychiatrist,
today justified as the patient’s liberation from an illness that robs him
of freedom and responsibility—belongs in the same pantheon of
brutal oppressions as do chattel slavery, colonialism, the Inquisition,
national socialism, international socialism (communism), and
institutions dedicated to the coercive betterment of humanity not yet
invented.

Sixty years ago, when I was young, the psychiatrist was

embarrassed by his role as coercer. Now, when I am old, he is
proud of it. That, in my opinion, is the sum total of the “progress”
achieved by modern, “scientific psychiatry.” It is a fearful truism
that we learn from history that we do not learn from history: “The
time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall
have gotten hold on us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold,
than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have
entered.” (Thomas Jefferson, 1782)

But this wolf does not enter. He is inherent in human nature, and we
must purge it from our own souls, one soul at a time.

Thomas S. Szasz

D r. Thomas Szasz (1920-2012) was a

Psychiatrist, academic, and champion of
individual rights. He devoted much of his life to campaigning against
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 many aspects of conventional psychiatry, in particular involuntary
psychiatric treatment and commitment.

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