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The writings of Thomas Szasz

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Ronald W. Pies
Ronald W. Pies*
Affiliation:
SUNY Upstate Medical University, Syracuse, New York and Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, USA; email: [email protected]
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BJPsych Bulletin , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , April 2017 , pp. 120
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Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an open-access article published by the Royal College of Psychiatrists and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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Copyright © 2017 The Author

Dr Benning Reference Benning1 nicely summarises some of the major conceptual errors in the writings of the late Dr Thomas Szasz.

Dr Szasz, who was one of my professors during residency, had important things to say about protecting the civil liberties of people with mental illness. However, his view of schizophrenia as a self-inflicted form of lying has done great injury to those who have this devastating illness. For example, in his 1996 book The Meaning of Mind, Szasz wrote:

‘I believe viewing the schizophrenic as a liar would advance our understanding of schizophrenia. What does he lie about? Principally about his own anxieties, bewilderments, confusions, deficiencies and self-deception’ Reference Szasz2 (p. 130).

In recent years Szasz's position has been undermined by scores of studies showing that individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia show brain abnormalities at a significantly higher frequency than healthy controls. Reference Bakhshi and Chance3–Reference Iritani5 More important, however, is the recognition that disease (dis-ease) is best understood as an enduring state of suffering and incapacity – not, as Szasz argued, as the presence of lesions or abnormal physiology. Reference Pies6

References

1 Benning, TB. No such thing as mental illness? Critical reflections on the major ideas and legacy of Thomas Szasz. BJPsych Bull 2016; 40: 292–95.Google Scholar
2 Szasz, TS. The Meaning of Mind: Language, Morality and Neuroscience. Praeger, 1996.Google Scholar
3 Bakhshi, K, Chance, SA. The neuropathology of schizophrenia: a selective review of past studies and emerging themes in brain structure and cytoarchitecture. Neuroscience 2015; 303: 82–102.Google Scholar
4 Woo, TU. Neurobiology of schizophrenia onset. Curr Top Behav Neurosci 2014; 16: 267–95.Google ScholarPubMed
5 Iritani, S. What happens in the brain of schizophrenia patients? An investigation from the viewpoint of neuropathology. Nagoya J Med Sci 2013; 75: 11–28.Google Scholar
6 Pies, R. On myths and countermyths: more on Szaszian fallacies. Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1979; 36: 139–44.Google Scholar
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