As befits the ministrations of a modern inquisitor, the persecutory practices of the institutional psychiatrist are couched in the vocabulary of medicine. Pretending to be diagnosing a measles-like illness during its incubation period in order the better to treat it, the psychiatrist actually imposes pseudomedical labels on society's scapegoats in order the better to handicap, reject, and destroy them.
The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement
The conversion of the Christian notion of sin as a requirement for salvation into the medical notion of sickness as a requirement for cure--that is, for medical salvation and success in the world ruled by the religion of medicine--has portentous implications which we ignore at our own peril. If left unchecked, we have, in this ideological premise, an incitement, a seduction, for people to assume the sick role and play it for all its worth, if only to be redeemed from it by miraculous cures which then lead straight to positions of prestige and power. Sanctified by recoveries--from alcoholism, drug addiction, and obesity today, and from who knows what other diseases tomorrow--the ex-patient becomes the prophet and ruler who can at last dominate and exploit, and be admired and glorified, instead of persecuted and vilified.
Dr. Thomas Szasz
Ceremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts and Pushers
I object to psychiatric diagnostic terms not because they are meaningless, but because they are used to stigmatize, dehumanize, imprison and torture those to whom they are applied. To put it somewhat differently, I oppose involuntary psychiatry, or the rape of the patient by the psychiatrist, but I do not oppose voluntary psychiatry, or psychiatric activities between consenting adults.
Dr. Thomas Szasz
The Theology of Medicine
I submit that the foregoing views consist of an approximately equal mixture of mendacity and nonsense. As a teacher in a medical school, I believe it is my duty to teach facts and theories as I see them, and not as the State, the American Medical Association, Alcoholics Anonymous, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the liquor industry, or any other group of special interests see them. In my judgement, the view that alcoholism is a disease is false; and the programs sponsored by the State and supported by tax moneys to 'cure' it are immoral and inconsistent with our political commitment to individual freedom and responsibility.....The misuse of alcohol--whatever the reason for it--is no more an illness than the misuse of any other product of human inventiveness, from language to nuclear energy."
Thomas Szasz
Primary Values and Major Contentions
Had not the Roman government permitted free inquiry, Christianity could never have been introduced. Had not free inquiry been indulged at the era of the Reformation, the corruptions of Christianity could not have been purged away. If it be restrained now, the present corruptions will be protected, and new ones encouraged. Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now.
Thomas Jefferson
Notes on the State of Virginia
The mental health system is a well-oiled machine that destroys the hopes and dreams of millions of vulnerable souls, wreaks havoc on their bodies, and inducts them into becoming chronic mental patients.
Seth Farber
Madness, Heresy, and the Rumor of Angels: The Revolt Against the Mental Health System
Psychiatric drugs and electroshock are spreading an epidemic of permanent brain damage.
Toxic Psychiatry, dust jacket.
The most serious threat to good government and freedom in America is not posed by evil-minded men and women. It is posed by legislative and judicial activists and other sincere persons of the best intentions, who are bent on remaking America in the image of their own thinking. They lack faith in the capacity of people to be the masters of their own fates, and the captains of their own souls, and insist that government assume the task of controlling their thoughts and managing their lives.
Senator Sam J. Ervin Jr.
Preserving the Constitution
Typical of the utter fraudulence of the Clinton health-care plan is the line about 'asking everyone to pay his fair share.' Government is not about 'asking.' It is about telling--and about punishing those who do not obey.
Editorial Page
The Virginian Pilot, June 10, 1994.
...that the purest system of morals ever before preached to man has been adulterated and sophisticated by artificial constructions, into a mere contrivance to filch wealth and power to themselves: that rational men, not being able to swallow their impious heresies, in order to force them down their throats, they raise the hue and cry of infidelity, while themselves are the greatest obstacles to the advancement of the real doctrine of Jesus, and do, in fact, constitute the real Anti-Christ.
Thomas Jefferson
Letter to Samuel Kercheval
January 19, 1810
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive...but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience...Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult...To be 'cured' against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. But to be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because we 'ought to have known better', is to be treated as a human person made in God's image...And when they are wicked the Humanitarian theory of punishment will put in their hands a finer instrument of tyranny than wickedness ever had before...The new Nero will approach us with the silky manners of a doctor, and though all will be in fact as compulsory as the tunica molesta or Smithfield or Tyburn, all will go on within the unemotional therapeutic sphere where words like 'right' and 'wrong' or 'freedom' and 'slavery' are never heard...Even if the treatment is painful, even if it is life-long, even if it is fatal, that will be only a regrettable accident; the intention was purely therapeutic...But because they are 'treatment, not punishment, they can be criticized only by fellow-experts and on technical grounds, never by men as men and on grounds of justice...But we ought long ago to have learned our lesson. We should be too old now to be deceived by those humane pretensions which have served to usher in every cruelty of the revolutionary period in which we live. These are the 'precious balms' which will 'break our heads'.
The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment
