Jacob Sullum celebrates the life of Thomas Szasz, "the great libertarian critic of coercive psychiatry, the 'therapeutic state,' and the war on drugs," who passed away recently:
Szasz, a Reason contributing editor and professor emeritus at Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, was driven throughout his long and remarkably productive career by what he called his "passion against coercion," especially the medicalized versions that recast repression as treatment. His radical critique of psychiatry, laid out in the 1960 American Psychologist essay "The Myth of Mental Illness" and then in a book of the same name the following year, may be more relevant today than ever, as the field grows to encompass every sin and foible despite its shaky empirical foundation. Szasz argued tirelessly that psychiatric labels, as nothing more than names attached to sets of behavioral criteria, should not be used to strip people of their freedom or relieve them of their responsibility. Defenders of mental-health orthodoxy dismiss this critique more often than they address it, but even when they engage Szasz's arguments they cannot refute his crucial point about the arbitrariness and subjectivity of psychiatric taxonomy.
Vaughan Bell appreciated Szasz's arguments but found his political views problematic and that they couldn't be disentangled from his psychiatric principles:
He was one of the most important critics of psychiatry not because he said it was done badly, but because he said it was incompatible with human liberty. A powerful reminder to a powerful profession. But so much of it relied on buying into Szasz’s politics – and this was his major failing. Szasz saw individual liberty as a pure and unalienable right while most see it as as important principle that should be balanced with the good of the community. Different people draw the line in different places while Szasz is clearly on the extreme end of the spectrum.
Judith Warner is harsher:
[T]he anti-treatment movement Szasz intellectually inspired facilitated the release of tens of thousands of seriously ill mental patients who, when they relapsed, had nowhere to go and no one to help them, and often ended up in prison or living life on the streets. Many mental health advocates today are struggling against the less well-considered aspects of the patients rights movement: working to support families who can’t secure care for their loved ones unless they are dangerously violent or suicidal.
The Dish 