The Jewish Doctor Who Tried to Save the World from Psychiatry

When a senior psychiatrist writes a book titled "The Myth of Mental Illness", the world takes notice. That is exactly what Dr. Thomas Szasz did in 1961. One of the rare rebels from within the medical establishment, he accused modern psychiatry of a profound moral and scientific deception.

Szasz, born in Hungary to a jewish family, both a psychiatrist and a passionate libertarian, never denied that people suffer emotionally. On the contrary, he took psychological pain seriously. But what he refused to accept throughout dozens of published books, was the notion that human distress is a "medical illness" to be diagnosed, classified, and in many cases, imposed upon by force.

Real Diseases and Invented Labels

Szasz drew a crucial distinction between bodily diseases and what is commonly called "mental illness." When someone has diabetes or cancer, objective medical tests can confirm it. But diagnoses like "narcissistic personality disorder" or "oppositional defiant disorder" are behavioral labels based on social norms, not hard science. In his view, there is no biological test that proves someone has a mental illness. What exists instead are interpretations, cultural expectations, and institutional authority. When a person behaves outside the accepted norms, psychiatry steps in - not to understand them, but to reshape them.

Psychiatry as a Secular Religion

Szasz believed that psychiatry had become the modern secular religion. It has its priests (psychiatrists), sins (deviant behavior), salvation (medication), and its hell (involuntary hospitalization). And like many religions before it, it found ways to wield real power:

Liberty Under Threat

For Szasz, this was not just a medical question but a moral one. When a society allows medical professionals to strip someone of liberty based on vague definitions of "insanity," it crosses a dangerous line. That is not healthcare - that is political control through clinical language.

In many ways, Szasz was ahead of his time. Today we see soaring psychiatric diagnoses, widespread medication use beginning in childhood, and the steady expansion of psychiatric language into every corner of life.

But perhaps, as Szasz predicted, what we call "mental healthcare" is often a way to make people more compliant with a preferred social order, rather than to truly help them.

Is There Another Way?

Szasz was not anti-treatment. He supported therapy - but only when it was voluntary, based on dialogue and respect. He insisted that we must allow people the right to be different, even radically so, without automatically labeling them as sick.

Perhaps it is time to hear his voice again. Not to reject all of psychiatry, but to re-establish its moral boundaries. Because once we start labeling emotions, beliefs, or nonconformity as illnesses, we open a door that leads not to healing - but to control.