The Medicalization of Everyday Life: Selected Essays

This collection of impassioned essays, published between 1973 and 2006, chronicles Thomas Szasz's long campaign against the orthodoxies of "pharmacracy," that is, the alliance of medicine and the state. From "Diagnoses Are Not Diseases" to "The Existential Identity Thief," "Fatal Temptation," and "Killing as Therapy," the book delves into the complex evolution of medicalization, concluding with "Pharmacracy: The New Despotism." In practice, society must draw a line between what counts as medical practice and what does not. Where it draws that line goes far in defining the kinds of laws its citizens live under, the kinds of medical care they receive, and the kinds of lives they are allowed to live.

Author: Thomas Szasz
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 10/08/2007
Pages: 232
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.71lbs
Size: 9.08h x 6.28w x 0.64d
ISBN13: 9780815608677
ISBN10: 0815608675
Large Print
BISAC Categories:
- Medical | Essays
- Psychology | Mental Health
- Medical | Psychiatry | Psychopharmacology

About the Author
Thomas Szasz is professor emeritus of psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University, Syracuse, New York. His books include Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry, The Manufacture of Madness, Ideology and Insanity, Our Right to Drugs, The Myth of Psychotherapy, and Pharmacracy, all published by Syracuse University Press.