The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement

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Summary: brilliant humanist writer
Review: a penetrating and enlightening analysis of things that make men crazy, namely power and control.

Thomas Szasz is a real hero of consciousness, freedom and intelligence who is never afraid to disclose the information that hurts the orthodoxy where it counts.

This work, like so many of his others, is a shining example of the great American libertarian vanguard.

Enjoy.

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Summary: 'mentally ill' is often another term for 'not like us'
Review: although thomas szasz was wrong to say that mental illness is totally a myth and that there is no reason to believe that there are people with mental disorders as debilitating as physical disorders, he certainly was right in attacking the mental health system for its often dehumanizing effects on people who simply have not been 'encultured' enough for the comfort of those around them. some of his work can be dismissed as dated anti psychiatry extremism, but some of it is absolutely relevant and as important today as it was when published

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Summary: A Totally Surprising and Amazing Book
Review: I first came across this book about 15 years ago while going through some stacks in the library of a community college in San Bruno CA. What stunned me at first was the equation of modern psychiatry being the child (i.e. direct decendant) of the Inquisition. I made a copy of the book but misplaced it. Even so, I thought about the little bit I read of it for years. It never left my mind.

Then the issue of manufacturing a person's madness came intimately into my life during the past two years or so. I found a used copy (maybe Amazon.com) and read it within the past three months. This book literally armed me with arguments that permitted me to persuade others--those holding the keys of bondage--that their system was flawed, and it resulted in the release of a person from incarceration in a mental institution. Since that time this person has been seen by a number of mental health professionals none of which attach a mental diagnosis to him.

I think the true value of this book to me is the psychoanalytic quality of the writing and its systematic approach. I would see it as being very hard to find Szasz's arguments as flawed, although I can see how some aspects of his thought maybe viewed as being exaggerated. Still, sometimes we all have to exaggerate a problem in order to expand it be able to sufficiently see what is actually going on. I think he does this eloquently and elegantly.

There were times when I was reading the book when I thought I might not get any more out of it, and I was tempted to set it aside, and I am so glad that I didn't. I feel now that this text was a very personal thing to him, and it comes out in the end, although it might not be completely evident.

I got a great deal out of reading this book. I would recommend it to anybody whose life has been affected by fear, doubt, superstition, dogmatic therapists, etc. Just knowing how the system is set up institutionally can assist one in making better choices and articulating your views, particularly when they are based on sensitive feelings.

Many mental health professionals like to come across at times as being god-like, but those who do come across this way are often insecure and exploit others to hide their own deficiencies. This book truly helps in being able to uncover that deception in a way that you can go nose to nose with the inquisitors of this generation who can be very dangerous and who can create a tremendous amount of damage.

It is scary, but it is far more scary without the knowledge Szasz has so generoously provided us, and which is made even more poignant given the persecutions he received from others within his own field.

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Summary: Scholarly but in a amusing and well written manner.
Review: Szasz's work is extremely important and its important that anyone who comes across his work reads it. We still have very unenlightened perspectives on such everyday terms as "insanity" and "crazy". Szasz insightfully explains how insanity is a value judgement, similar to "good" and "bad". Szasz writes his ideas not only well, but in a human voice and in a humorous way at times. Included is a chapter about Masturbatory Insanity, which is well worth the purchase of this book. The comparison between the Inquistion and the abstract institution called "psychiatry" is a playful and humorous one (its SO extreme that it is extremely funny). Szasz argues this quite well too, taking the extreme comparison seriously and revealing the frightening similarities that evoke anger and unrest in the reader. The book will open your mind to much.

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Summary: Attacking the Disease Model
Review: The Manufacture of Madness is a fine historical analysis of psychiatry and the mental health movement, drawing comparisons between the medical establishment's treatment of deviants as mental patients and the Inquisition's treatment of deviants as witches. Radical, perhaps, although it must have seemed much more radical in 1970, when first published. Dr. Szasz knew his material well, having worked for twenty years as a psychiatrist in this country prior to writing the book.

His views were considered heretical by his colleagues (an irony that he makes much of) because he argued, quite strongly, that institutional psychiatry is dehumanizing both to patients and society as a whole because it deprives these people of all rights, treats them as objects to be repaired, and submits them to cruel tortures in the name of therapy. He went on to declare that mental illness itself is a myth; there has never been a scientific basis for treating social and behavioral deviance as stemming from the same causes as physical illnesses, nor reason to try to cure it. His central thesis is that institutional psychiatry fills the same role in modern times as the Inquisition did until only a few hundred years ago--a system of control and suppression of social deviants.

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Summary: Mental Illness: A Study in Scapegoating.
Review: _The Manufacture of Madness_ by right wing libertarian "anti-psychiatrist" Thomas Szasz is a comparative essay showing the similarity and growth of the "religion of mental illness" from the Inquisition, the persecution of heretics, and the days of witch hunting. Szasz contends that the idea of "mental illness" is in fact a category mistake involving a false notion of "illness". Much of this book is spent demonstrating how society in the form of the "mental health movement" seeks to root out dissenters and heretics in order to protect the reigning order (or to achieve a new scientistic based order controlled by doctor-bureaucrats - the modern day utopia of "the Brave New World"). Szasz finds notable similarity between the mental health movement and the Inquisition and persecution of witches (including the comparison made between the _DSM_ and the notorious witch hunter's manual _Malleus Maleficarum_). Szasz observes that society has always had certain individuals who defied convention and thus posed a threat to the reigning order. These individuals (mostly eccentrics, romantics, dreamers, dissidents, and heretics) were often rounded up by society's "protectors" and then identified as the "inner enemy" and thus conveniently "scapegoated". Tradition held that the scapegoat served as the embodiment for all of the sins within the given enclosed society. Thus, for Szasz, the so-called mentally ill individual is identified as an eccentric by the modern day "therapeutic state" and deemed to serve as the scapegoat for the sins of a given society through the process of forced confinement. Those who fall too far to the right or left of the bell curve are arbitrarily deemed "abnormal" after some cutoff point and therefore forcibly confined, their civil liberties denied to them. Often such an individual is a poor man or woman who is eccentric and lives alone. Such a person makes an easy target for the statist "thought police" of the world of 1984. Despite their denials of their illness, such individuals are arbitrarily declared ill and confined. Nearly all categories within the _DSM_ have clear reference to class, race, and sex biases. Nearly all categories can serve conveniently as a tool of the wealthy and dominant elite against the impoverished classes. While society may deny civil liberties to certain individuals, the real problem is that it has failed to provide a way to fully integrate such eccentric individuals into its dominant structures. Thus, Szasz seeks to re-politicize a process that is often entirely de-politicized and defined in terms of illness. The first half of this book offers a comparative survey of mental illness and the mental health movement and the persecution of witches and heretics. One may consult the works particularly of Norman Cohn, a historian who deals with the medieval period and some of the mass hysteria that existed at that time, for a detailed examination of this topic within Europe particularly. However, Szasz fails to mention that the notion of madness predates the medieval period going back as far as Biblical times and being discussed by such illustrious Greeks as Aristotle and Socrates in terms of ethics. The second half of the book deals with the manufacture of madness by what amounts to "mad doctors". Here, the great American doctor and an important framer of the Constitution, Benjamin Rush is discussed. Rush often viewed political conflicts in terms of illness, proving for Szasz that the notion of illness has been repeatedly abused so as to further a political agenda. Rush's advocation of "cures" for individuals deemed to be "mentally ill" often amount to barbarous cruelty. Psychiatry has a long, bloody, and inglorious history involving forced medication and confinement, as well as electroshock and insulin shock therapies, and "insane" psycho-surgeries, as well as a thousand other tortures. Szasz also discusses the notions of heresy, medical stigma and scapegoating, as well as two of the more notorious deviancies which psychiatry originally sought after: masturbation and homosexuality. The ridiculousness and obsession of psychiatry with these sorts of disorders which would otherwise be deemed as sinful, demonstrates the absurd lengths to which many doctors would go (supported by Freudian theory) to legitimize their practice. For example, consider this ironically crude remark made by German physician, Werner Villinger, in the 1920s, which speaks of masturbation as "a snake which has to be throttled". Such outbreaks of hysteria and "masturbatory insanity" were common during this era. Szasz would argue for example that the removal of both masturbation and homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses in the _DSM_ proves that these so called "illnesses" are nothing more than social constructs reflecting the dominant morality of the era. While I agree with Szasz on many points he makes here, I disagree with him to a certain extent. The fact is that certain individuals pose a threat to the dominant order, either as criminals or as causing a great deal of dissent. Also, unlike Szasz I believe that religion and the church serve a useful purpose in society and disagree violently with his secular humanistic stance and rejection of God. The question remains however who should the notion of "mental illness" serve principally. Should it serve the patient, should it serve the family, or should it serve society at large (which is increasingly coming to resemble a scientistic dystopia)? In a traditionalist based society, for example, the so called "mentally ill" would be regarded as seers, prophets, or magicians and treated with reverence. In today's world they are often treated maliciously. Mental illness often amounts to nothing more than what traditionally was known as eccentricity, magic, religious experience, mysticism, the experience of being truly "awake", and other unusual experiences. These experiences should not be declared abnormal or somehow outside the human condition by a scientistic and materialist based culture.