To those skeptical of modern psychiatry, however, Dr. Szasz was a foundational figure… <\/sup><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
In 1974 when I started as a psychiatry resident, I was in a class of residents that was an odd lot. There was one who was a devoted follower of Dr. Thomas Szasz, very devoted. In every conference and lecture, he brought up something about the teachings of Dr. Szasz, but for the life of me, back then I couldn’t nail down what he was talking about. In the area of Forensic Psychiatry, the position was fairly clear. He was opposed to involuntary commitment. He saw no place for psychiatric opinion in things like testamentary capacity or criminal proceedings. All were abuses of power by psychiatrists. So, in that vain, Szasz was protecting people from psychiatrists. His prophet in our group never tired of talking about that. On the other hand, Szasz was apparently rabid about responsibility – people were responsible for their actions. The things they did were freely chosen and they should be held accountable, including consequences. This resident, a well spoken and educated guy, was hard to be around. No matter what any of us said about anything, it was wrong, a sign that we had yet to be enlightened. He was argumentative [as in argumentative as a noun].<\/div>\n
As those early weeks went on, there was something else odd. We were on the Grady Hospital In-Patient Unit, and every morning, we got a sheet with all of the residents and their patients. He had very few. We worked every fourth night, and our patients were mostly people we admitted on call. The daytime admissions admitted by staff were rotated among us. The only patients he had were from those daytime admissions. One morning, I got to work and saw the Chief Resident carrying a stack of charts followed by this resident getting on the elevator, and neither showed up for morning rounds. Later that day, the Chief Resident called a meeting, told us that the resident in question was gone, divvied up his patients, and left the room. I never saw that resident again. The Chief Resident remained silent for the rest of the year.<\/p>\n
Some years later, I ran into my former chief resident at a meeting, and he told me the story. When he realized that there were essentially no admissions on this resident’s call nights, he started reviewing the charts of the patients seen. On the morning I described, he had confronted the resident and gone over the cases one by one. After that meeting, he drove him to the Chairman’s Office across town with the charts in hand and announced that one of them had to leave the Department immediately. After going over the charts, it wasn’t the Chief Resident that got fired. It was our resident Szaszian. Grady Hospital in downtown Atlanta is not for the faint-hearted. The patients brought there are often violent, psychotic people completely out of control. It seems that this resident would lecture to the patients that they were responsible for their behavior, talk to them about life being made up of choices, and send them on their way. Apparently, on his nights on call, the staff had been surreptitiously holding the patients over that they were uncomfortable about releasing for the regular ER staff psychiatrists to see the next day. I heard that he later applied to SUNY where Szasz was on faculty, but was turned down. The Internet says he finished a residency in a small program in the mid-west and practices in a town near where he trained. <\/p>\n
After that episode, I got curious and read some Szasz – the Myth of Mental Illness<\/font><\/strong> and something else. It seemed monotonous. I decided that Szasz was more ideologue than psychiatrist. Something of an Ayn Rand like figure. Someone to read and think about, but nothing more. The flagrantly psychotic people brought to the Grady Emergency Room should either be left alone to be free, or held responsible for their actions. If a crime were committed, Mental Illness was not a mitigating factor. So our resident was, indeed, practicing Szasz as it was written. I think Dr. Szasz made me think more deeply about the commitment laws, testamentary capacity, criminal responsibility, the arrogance of some psychiatrists, but I found his view of human beings as living in a world of voluntary choices an untenable way of looking at the desperately ill people I was learning about in that period of my training, and later. As time passed, I saw some videos of him speaking. He filled any room he entered. He was an impish, quick-witted, charismatic contrarian. I bet he never lost an argument. He took on psychoanalysts, behaviorists, psychiatrists, psychopharmacologists, legal scholars, and sometimes mental patients with equal relish. We were all off the mark.<\/p>\nAt one point, I asked our resident the question that must’ve been asked of Dr. Szasz repeatedly. "Why are you here?" That was forty years ago and I don’t recall what he said, except that he thought my question off the mark.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dr. Thomas Szasz, Psychiatrist Who Led Movement Against His Field, Dies at 92 New York Times by BENEDICT CAREY September 11, 2012 Thomas Szasz, a psychiatrist whose 1961 book “The Myth of Mental Illness” questioned the legitimacy of his field and provided the intellectual grounding for generations of critics, patient advocates and antipsychiatry activists, making […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27391"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27391\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43013,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27391\/revisions\/43013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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