Thomas Szasz: Rebel with a questionable cause

摘要

In the course of providing an excellent summary of the late Thomas Szasz's long and troubled relationship with conventional psychiatry, Arthur Williams and Arthur Caplan (Oct 20, p 1378) assign his views great influence in "three key court cases" beginning in 1972 in the USA. These reflected Szasz's scepticism about the existence of mental illness and hence the justification for admitting psychiatric patients to hospital. Yet by the 1960s, courts were already reconsidering involuntary civil commitment of psychiatric patients, not on the grounds that there was no such thing as psychiatric illness, but the converse: that "the purpose of involuntary commitment is treatment, not punishment", as Chief Judge David Bazelon wrote in 1966 in the landmark case of Rouse v Cameron.