The Medicalization of Everyday Life: Selected Essays

Psychiatrist Szasz, professor emeritus at SUNY Upstate Medical University, continues his iconoclastic career in this short book of essays (previously published in journals) spanning much of his professional life. He details how the medical and legal systems have combined to form a new type of government: the pharmacracy. Examples include improving public health through “coercive paternalism” (read: bans on smoking and transfat). This, Szasz states, is a crime, and psychiatry is the prima facie culprit, a structure built on oppression. Szasz reiterates his longstanding idea that mental illness is not a disease and drugs cannot treat the mind, which is an abstraction, not a physical entity. Szasz is principally concerned with the individual's freedom from the state. In “Killing as Therapy: The Case of Terri Schiavo,” he asserts that the withdrawal of life support from Schiavo was emblematic of doctors “waging a war on autonomy” (since Schiavo's own desire in the matter was not known). But all is not tirade; Szasz can be subtly humorous: “Being officially nuts is like being officially heretical or un-American, not like being infected with malaria.” This is a wonderful, impassioned book that is, considering the recent media attention to psychopharmaceuticals, a welcome investigation of the social ramifications involved. (Oct.)