No further evidence is needed to show that 'mental illness' is not the name of a biological condition whose nature awaits to be elucidated, but is the name of a concept whose purpose is to obscure the obvious.
Thomas SzaszRead
Child psychology and child psychiatry cannot be reformed. They must be abolished.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The current approaches in child psychology and psychiatry are fundamentally flawed and need to be completely replaced rather than improved.
Thomas Szasz argues that child psychology and psychiatry are inadequate systems that cannot simply be improved through reform; instead, they require a complete overhaul. He suggests that the methodologies used in these fields are inherently problematic, leading to the conclusion that such practices should be entirely abolished, indicating a need for new perspectives and frameworks when it comes to understanding and treating children.
Themes
PsychologyPsychiatryChildrenReformAbolitionMental HealthEducation
In practice
Example use cases
During a seminar on childhood mental health, one might quote Szasz to emphasize the need for new strategies in dealing with children's psychological issues.
More from Thomas Szasz
All quotes βClassifying thoughts, feelings and behaviors as diseases is a logical and semantic error, like classifying whale as fish.
Thomas SzaszRead
Addiction, obesity, starvation (anorexia nervosa) are political problems, not psychiatric: each condense and expresses a contest between the individual and some other person or persons in his environment over the control of the individual's body.
Thomas SzaszRead
In the past, men created witches: now they create mental patients.
Thomas SzaszRead
Self-respect is to the soul as oxygen is to the body. Deprive a person of oxygen, and you kill his body; deprive him of self-respect and you kill his spirit.
Thomas SzaszRead
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 SzaszRead
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