Cruel Compassion Quotes

“The young and the old are defenseless against relatives who want to get rid of them by casting them in the role of mental patient,and against psychiatrists whose livelihood depends on defining them as mentally ill.”
― Thomas Stephen Szasz, Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted

“Although both home and mental illness are complex, modern ideas, we have fallen into the habit of using phrases such as "housing the homeless" and "treating the mentally ill" as if we knew what counts as housing a homeless person or what it means to treat mental illness. But we do not. We have deceived ourselves that having a home and being mentally healthy are our natural conditions, and that we become homeless or mentally ill as a result of "losing" our homes or our minds. The opposite is the case. We are born without a home and without reason, and have to exert ourselves and are fortunate if we succeed in building a secure home and a sound mind.”
― Thomas Stephen Szasz, Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted

“It is the lot of mankind to feel not only insecure but also bored. To combat that experience, people long to be passively entertained, which requires less effort than assuming responsibility for self-improvement.”
― Thomas Stephen Szasz, Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted

“He who does not want to understand the Other has no right to say that what the Other does or says makes no sense.”
― Thomas Stephen Szasz, Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted

“Modern Western democracies no longer engage in such despotic assaults on freedom, Instead, they deprive people of liberty indirectly, by relieving them of responsibility for their own (allegedly self-injurious) actions and calling the intervention "treatment.”
― Thomas Stephen Szasz, Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted

“The term 'deinstitutionalization' conceals some simple truths, namely, that old, unwanted persons, formerly housed in state hospitals, are now housed in nursing homes; that young, unwanted persons, formerly also housed in state hospitals, are now housed in prisons or parapsychiatric facilities; and that both groups of inmates are systematically drugged with psychiatric medications.”
― Thomas Stephen Szasz, Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted

“When and why do we attribute a person's behavior to brain disease, and when and why do we not do so? Briefly, the answer is that we often attribute bad behavior to disease (to excuse the agent);never attribute good behavior to disease (lest we deprive the agent of credit); and typically attribute good behavior to free will and insist bad behavior called mental illness is a "no fault" act of nature.”
― Thomas Stephen Szasz, Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted

“The cruelty intrinsic to the workhouse system was excused by the need to discourage idleness, much as the malice intrinsic to the mental hospital system has been excused by the need to provide treatment.”
― Thomas Stephen Szasz, Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted

“The fatal weakness of most psychiatric historiographies lies in the historians' failure to give sufficient weight to the role of coercion in psychiatry and to acknowledge that mad-doctoring had nothing to do with healing.”
― Thomas Stephen Szasz, Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted

“For the libertarian, the state is a guardian entrusted with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and hence a permanent threat to individual liberty. Whereas for the (modern) liberal, the state is a social apparatus for protecting people from destitution, discrimination, and disease. Those who distrust the state, believe the government should provide only those services that individuals or informal groups cannot provide for themselves. Those who trust it, believe the government should provide as many services as people in need require.”
― Thomas Stephen Szasz, Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted

“The pressure to reduce health care costs is aimed only at the treatment of real diseases. There is no pressure to reduce the costs of treating fictitious diseases. On the contrary, there is pressure to define ever more types of undesirable behaviors as mental disorders or addictions and to spend ever more tax dollars on developing new psychiatric diagnoses and facilities for storing and treating the victims of such diseases, whose members now include alcoholics, drug abusers, smokers, overeaters, self-starvers, gamblers, etc.”
― Thomas Stephen Szasz, Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted

“Honoring the value of competence and steadfastness requires a generosity of spirit and a curbing of the passion for envy, traits that few people value and fewer still cultivate and acquire. Not until there is more of Smith and less of Hobbes in the human heart, will the majority of people prefer peaceful and boring market relations to the violent and exciting relations between coercer and coerced, predator and victim”
― Thomas Stephen Szasz, Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted

“We cannot institutionalize helping the "victims" of personal disasters.”
― Thomas Stephen Szasz, Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted