FAMOUS QUOTES FROM AN ANTI-PSYCHIATRY PERSPECTIVE

Labeling a child as mentally ill is stigmatization, not diagnosis. Giving a child a psychiatric drug is poisoning, not treatment.
        Thomas Szasz


Quotes regarding Anti-psychiatry.


Since theocracy is the rule of God or its priests, and democracy the rule of the people or of the majority, pharmacracy is therefore the rule of medicine or of doctors.[Thomas SSasz]

Behavioral psychology is the science of pulling habits out of rats.  ~Douglas Busch

A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong.
Thomas Szasz

A teacher should have maximal authority, and minimal power.
Thomas Szasz

Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum.
Thomas Szasz

Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.
Thomas Szasz

Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence.
Thomas Szasz

Doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about persons and things; the psychotic has convictions and makes claims about them. In short, the neurotic has problems, the psychotic has solutions.
Thomas Szasz

Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily.
Thomas Szasz

Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.
Thomas Szasz

Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly often attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.
Thomas Szasz

If God talks to you, you are schizophrenic.
        Thomas Szasz

    The only difference between the Sane and the Insane, is IN and yet within this world, the Sane have the power to have the Insane locked up.
        Hunter S. Thompson
  

  I'd rather be alone with a schizophrenic than a psychiatrist.
        Carol Batton

    In the serene world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicates with the madman: on one hand, the man of reason delegates the physician to madness, thereby authorizing a relation only through the abstract universality of disease; on the other, the man of madness communicates with society only by the intermediary of an equally abstract reason which is order, physical and moral constraint, the anonymous pressure of the group, the requirements of conformity. As for a common language, there is no such thing; or rather, there is no such thing any longer.
        Michel Foucault

    Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.
        Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche