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For over fifty percent a hundred years, Thomas Szasz has dedicated a lot of his career to a radical critique of psychiatry. His latest work, Psychiatry: The Knowledge of Lies, is a culmination of his life's work: to portray the integral role of deception in the annals and practice of psychiatry. Szasz argues that the prognosis and treatment of mental disease stands in the same romance to the prognosis and treatment of physical disease that the forgery of an painting does to the initial masterpiece. Fine art historians and the legal system seek to tell apart forgeries from originals. Those concerned with medicine, on the other hand - health professionals, patients, politicians, health-insurance providers, and lawyers - take the contrary stance when faced with the task of distinguishing every day problems in living from physical diseases, systematically authenticating non-diseases as diseases. The boundary between disease and non-disease - genuine and imitation, truth and falsehood - thus becomes arbitrary and uncertain. There is certainly neither glory nor income in effectively demarcating what counts as medical disease and medical curing from what will not. Individuals and individuals wishing to protect themselves from clinically and politically authenticated charlatanry are left with their own intellectual and moral resources to make critical decisions about individual dilemmas miscategorized as "mental diseases" and about medicalized reactions misidentified as "psychiatric treatments." Delivering his advanced research in lucid prose and with a distinct wit, Szasz continues to activate and challenge readers of most backgrounds. Thomas Szasz is teacher emeritus of psychiatry at their state College or university of New York's Upstate Medical College or university in Syracuse, New York.
