Years ago, while I was teaching at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, one of my students, a physician from communist China visiting on a fellowship, told me how deeply she appreciated being able to study the ideas of Thomas Szasz in my class. I remember her telling me about how her parents and siblings had committed suicide together as a way of holding on to what little autonomy they had left in that ghastly totalitarian society.
Suicide is an ethical issue, not a medical issue. In his review of Szasz' book, Fatal Freedom: the Ethics and Politics of Suicide, Paul Links confuses the two.1 This reaction is not new. Institutional psychiatry has felt threatened by Szasz' ideas since he wrote The Myth of Mental Illness 40 years ago. Szasz' writings undermine psychiatric totalitarianism and are the tolling bell of the therapeutic state.
Institutional psychiatry may not go gentle into that good night. Nevertheless, into that good night it will eventually go.
Reference
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