In the United States more people are confined in psychiatric hospitals than in prisons. How is this imprisonment of persons innocent of lawbreaking justified? Why do courts and lawyers, civil libertarians and psychiatrists support involuntary mental hospitalization?
These are the main questions Thomas Szasz-who, twenty years ago, awakened the conscience of America to the evils of institutional psychiatry and is now the leading opponent of psychiatric coercion-addresses in Psychiatric Slavery. Reaffirming the indivisibility of freedom and responsibility, Dr. Szasz helps us to understand the problem of involuntary mental hospitalization in all its economic, medical, moral, political, psychological, and social complexity. Analyzing and attacking the arguments advanced in defense of civil commitment, Dr. Szasz demonstrates the alarming parallels between involuntary servitude and involuntary psychiatry: when chattel slavery flourished, the dominant social institutions and their representatives supported it as beneficial for the slave and necessary for society; now that coercive psychiatry flourishes, the dominant social institutions and their representatives support it as beneficial for the "mentally sick patient" and necessary for society. Just as masters would not grant freedom to slaves as long as white people believed that blacks were less than human and insisted on protecting them from themselves by enslaving them, so psychiatrists will not grant freedom to "hospitalized psychotics" as long as normal people believe that "mental patients" are less than human and insist on protecting them from themselves by committing them.
TÁRSADALOMTUDOMÁNY (történelem nélkül) / Pszichológia kategória termékei
Thomas Szasz: Psychiatric Slavery
Kiadás:
New York; London, 1977
Kiadó:
Kategóriák:
Nyelv:
Angol
Terjedelem:
159 p.
Kötésmód:
egészvászon
ISBN:
0029316006