Pharmakos, the Scapegoat

Dr. Szasz is in danger of becoming a Johnny One-note: crusader for a radically revised American psychiatry, dispeller of the “myth of mental illness,” Defender of the Faithless. His contentions that “mental illness” is a rhetorical device, not a description of reality, and “addiction” a nonsense concept, are not very convincing, when yesterday’s “madman” slaughters 15 innocents with his shotgun, proclaims himself Napoleon, and is discovered to have been under observation by a shrink who diagnosed him a borderline schizophrenic; his contentions aren’t very convincing when tomorrow’s junkie mugs and murders the old lady in order to get cash for his fix.

Ceremonial Chemistry flows logically from Szasz’s several previous attempts at overturning accepted beliefs about deviance. Subtitled “The ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers,” it concentrates not on those whose difference from the norm makes them “mentally sick,” but rather on those whose choice of drug qualifies them for the societal pejorative, “addict.” To Szasz, “addictions are habits [and] we must judge addictions as good or bad according to the value we place on what they enable us to do or disable us from doing.”

Dr. Szasz is in danger of becoming a Johnny One-note: crusader for a radically revised American psychiatry, dispeller of the “myth of mental illness,” Defender of the Faithless. His contentions that “mental illness” is a rhetorical device, not a description of reality, and “addiction” a nonsense concept, are not very convincing, when yesterday’s “madman” slaughters 15 innocents with his shotgun, proclaims himself Napoleon, and is discovered to have been under observation by a shrink who diagnosed him a borderline schizophrenic; his contentions aren’t very convincing when tomorrow’s junkie mugs and murders the old lady in order to get cash for his fix.

Ceremonial Chemistry flows logically from Szasz’s several previous attempts at overturning accepted beliefs about deviance. Subtitled “The ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers,” it concentrates not on those whose difference from the norm makes them “mentally sick,” but rather on those whose choice of drug qualifies them for the societal pejorative, “addict.” To Szasz, “addictions are habits [and] we must judge addictions as good or bad according to the value we place on what they enable us to do or disable us from doing.”