Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America

by Thomas Szasz

Book Overview

The modern penchant for transforming human problems into "diseases" and judicial sanctions into "treatments," replacing the rule of law with the rule of medical discretion, leads to a type of government social critic Thomas Szasz calls "pharmacracy." He warns that the creeping substitution of democracy for pharmacracyprivate personal concerns increasingly perceived as requiring a medical-political responseinexorably erodes personal freedom and dignity...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0815607636
• ISBN13: 9780815607632
• Release Date: September 2003
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Length: 248 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

The Politics of Medicine

This is a great book for laying to rest some orthodox but wrong ideas about our mental health. Szasz shows us that the orthodox way is not necessarily the right way. Certainly our own doctors are not going to blow the whistle on themselves, are they? This revolutionary psychiatrist shows us the real path to health, pointing us away from the wrong direction that the pharmaceutical companies have been leading us, and unfortunately, leading our doctors as well. It's a case of the fox guarding the henhouse. Do you care that a psychiatrist is a doctor who prescribes drugs to change people's brains without ever actually examining those people's brains? Do you worry that nobody knows exactly what the long-term effect of these drugs are that we are now being given for bi-polar disorder, for attention deficit disorder, for depression or for anxiety; or even if they are really doing us more harm than good? Do you know how doctors today are becoming more and more controlled and subverted by the pharmaceutical industry? Do you think that unwanted behavior and unwanted feelings like anxiety and depression are diseases that can be cured by drugs? If you do, you should read the latest book by this world renowned psychiatrist. "Psychiatrists have a long history of systematically validating fake diseases as real diseases, and getting away with it," says Szasz. They can get away with it because it serves everybody: the family whose medical insurance will pay only for certain diagnoses and not for others; the government officials who can allocate more and more federal funds for their universities and laboratories; and the doctors who can service many more patients in the "service station" atmosphere that has us all believing that everything can be made right with the right pill. The only person whom fake diagnoses and powerful drugs are not serving is the health of the individual who is having his birthright sold for a pharmaceutical mess of pottage. We are confusing, warns Szasz, bodily diseases which are physiochemical phenomena located in the body and understood by cellular pathology with unwanted personal habits or behaviors which are located in the social context of society and understood by the interconnecting relationships. We are confusing the mind with the brain. And finally, we are confusing medicine with politics and social agenda. In so doing we are becoming less and less the land of the free and the brave and more and more the land of the mentally ill and deluded. Szasz makes a good case for a new look at the insidious subversion of our medical care by the politics of pharmaceutical managed care.

this book could save your life

PharmacracyDo you care that a psychiatrist is a doctor who prescribes drugs to change people's brains without ever actually examining those people's brains? Do you worry that nobody knows exactly what the long-term effect of these drugs are that we are now being given for bi-polar disorder, for attention deficit disorder, for depression or for anxiety; or even if they are really doing us more harm than good? Do you know how doctors today are becoming more and more controlled and subverted by the pharmaceutical industry? Are unwanted behavior and unwanted feelings like anxiety and depression diseases that can be cured by drugs? If you think they are, please run as fast as you can and get this book. It could save your life.

Thomas Szasz Does It Again

Dr. Szasz, now 81 years old, has done it again: explained what's going on in the minds of psychiatrists and their adulators from the Surgeon General on down. And why. For example, he tells us how doctors are really paid and explains the corrupting effect of third party reimbursement by DRG (Diagnosis Related Groups)on the most important and the kindest thing any doctor can do: make an accurate diagnosis.There are new insights, new quotes and the usual entertaining anecdotes and fastidious footnotes.Psychiatric obscurantism is impacting every American every time he or she is misinformed: "Depression is a disease like diabetes - ask your Doctor about...." And that's just TV.What kills me is how the parrots of psychobaffle preen themselves on their courage at having broken through the mind body barrier - as if obliterating one of childhood's most important lessons - that thinking doesn't make it so - is an accomplishment to squawk over: "Look Mom, I can fly."How dumb can we get? Read this book and find out. The bamboozlement of Mental Health already is to the 21st Century what the propaganda of Communism and National Socialism were to the 20th. Immunize yourself now.Dr. Szasz has been one of the clearest thinkers and writers for 50 years and this book is another brilliant facet to the immense diamond which is his life's work.