Thomas Szasz - The Manufacture of Madness (1970)

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The episode in Sodom is undoubtedly the earliest account in human history of the entrapment of homosexuals, a strategy widely practiced by the law enforcement agencies of modern Western countries, especially those of the United States. In effect, the men of Sodom were entrapped by two strangers, who in truth were not travelers but angels, that is to say, God's plain-clothesmen. These agents of the Biblical vice-squad wasted no time punishing the offenders.

Thomas Szasz
Institutional psychiatry is a continuation of the Inquisition. All that has really changed is the vocabulary and the social style. The vocabulary conforms to the intellectual expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-medical jargon that parodies the concepts of science. The social style conforms to the political expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-liberal social movement that parodies the ideals of freedom and rationality.

Thomas Szasz
There is a fundamental similarity between the persecution of individuals who engage in consenting homosexual activity in private, or who ingest, inject, or smoke various substances that alter their feelings and thoughts—and the traditional persecution of men for their religion. … What all of these persecutions have in common is that the victims are harassed by the majority not because they engage in overtly aggressive or destructive acts, … but because their conduct or appearance offends a group intolerant to and threatened by human differences.

Thomas Szasz
The Christian ethic did not raise the worth of female life much above the Jewish: nor did the clinical ethic raise it much above the clerical. This is why most of those identified as witches by male inquisitors were women; and why most of those diagnosed as hysterics by male psychiatrists were also women.

Thomas Szasz
My contention is that the psychiatric perspective on homosexuality is but a thinly disguised replica of the religious perspective which it displaced, and that efforts to treat this kind of conduct medically are but thinly disguised methods for suppressing it.

Thomas Szasz
The treatment can have only one goal: to convert the heretic to the true faith, to transform the homosexual into a heterosexual.

Thomas Szasz
The passion to interpret as madness that with which we disagree seems to have infected the best of contemporary minds.

Thomas Szasz
Over the past thirty years, we have replaced the medical-political persecution of illegal sex users ("perverts" and "psychopaths") with the even more ferocious medical-political persecution of illegal drug users.

Thomas Szasz
Like the devout theologian seeing the Devil lurking everywhere, Menninger, the devout Freudian, sees aggression.

Thomas Szasz
As the dominant social ethic changed from a religious to a secular one, the problem of heresy disappeared, and the problem of madness arose and became of great social significance. In the next chapter I shall examine the creation of social deviants, and shall show that as formerly priests had manufactured heretics, so physicians, as the new guardians of social conduct and morality, began to manufacture madmen.

Thomas Szasz
So long as men denounce each other as mentally sick (homosexual, addicted, insane, and so forth)—so that the madman can always be considered the Other, never the Self—mental illness will remain an easily exploitable concept, and Coercive Psychiatry a flourishing institution.

Thomas Szasz
The crime [homosexuality] was subject to punishment by both secular and ecclesiastical courts—just as now it is subject to punishment by both penal and psychiatric sanctions.

Thomas Szasz
By pretending that convention is Nature, that disobeying a personal prohibition is a medical illness, they establish themselves as agents of social control and at the same time disguise their punitive interventions in the semantic and social trappings of medical practice.

Thomas Szasz
In English-speaking countries, the connection between heresy and homosexuality is expressed through the use of a single word to denote both concepts: buggery. … Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (Third Edition) defines buggery as heresy, sodomy.

Thomas Szasz
We shall therefore compare the concept of homosexuality as heresy, prevalent in the days of the witch-hunts, with the concept of homosexuality as mental illness, prevalent today.

Thomas Szasz
The homosexual is a scapegoat who evokes no sympathy. Hence, he can only be a victim, never a martyr.

Thomas Szasz
In the past, men created witches: now they create mental patients.

Thomas Szasz
The disease concept of homosexuality—as with the disease concept of all so-called mental illnesses, such as alcoholism, drug addiction, or suicide—conceals the fact that homosexuals are a group of medically stigmatized and socially persecuted individuals. … Their anguished cries of protest are drowned out by the rhetoric of therapy—just as the rhetoric of salvation drowned out the [cries] of heretics.

Thomas Szasz