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Suicide Prohibition
The Shame of Medicine
Thomas Szasz
Cloth $19.95
| 978-0-8156-0990-2
| 2011
"Another masterpiece. Szasz has produced a strong
philosophical, psychiatric, forensic, sociological, and ethical analysis
of suicide. I emphasize sociological, as it is a worthy heir to Durkheim’s
classical contribution."—Henry Lothane, Mount Sinai School of Medicine
"[Thomas Szasz] is the preeminent critic of psychiatry in the world."—Richard Vatz, Towson University
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Thomas Szasz is professor emeritus of psychiatry at the State University of New
York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York. His books include Law,
Liberty, and Psychiatry, The Manufacture of Madness, Ideology and Insanity,
Ceremonial Chemistry, The Myth of Psychotherapy, Psychiatry, and The Medicalization
of Everyday Life, all published by Syracuse University Press.
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In Western thought, suicide has evolved from sin to sin–and–crime, to
crime, to mental illness, and to semilegal act. A legal act is one we are
free to think and speak about and plan and perform, without penalty by
agents of the state.
While dying voluntarily is ostensibly legal, suicide attempts and even
suicidal thoughts are routinely punished by incarceration in a psychiatric
institution. Although many people believe the prevention of suicide is one
of the duties the modern state owes its citizens, Szasz argues that suicide
is a basic human right and that the lengths to which the medical industry
goes to prevent it represent a deprivation of that right.
Drawing on his general theory of the myth of mental illness, Szasz makes
a compelling case that the voluntary termination of one’s own life is the result
of a decision, not a disease. He presents an in-depth examination and
critique of contemporary anti–suicide policies, which are based on the notion
that voluntary death is a mental health problem, and systematically lays out
the dehumanizing consequences of psychiatrizing suicide prevention.
If suicide be deemed a problem, it is not a medical problem. Managing
it as if it were a disease, or the result of a disease, will succeed only
in debasing medicine and corrupting the law. Pretending to be the pride
of medicine, psychiatry is its shame.
5 1/2 x 8 1/2, 160 pages, appendix, notes, bibliography, index
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