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Journal of Humanistic Psychology
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Psychiatry Fraud and Force? A Commentary on E. Fuller Torrey and Thomas Szasz

Michael Alan Schwartz, M.D.

Osborne P. Wiggins, Ph.D.

University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky

In a pair of articles in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, E. Fuller Torrey’s psychiatry is castigated by Thomas Szasz. In return, Torrey dismisses Szasz’s criticism as "increasingly anachronistic." The current exchange clarifies the early ties between the two and their subsequent unraveling. Apparently at opposite ends of the psychiatric spectrum, Szasz and Torrey actually have much in common and share foundational assumptions about mind and body, the definition of "disease," and the nature of medical practice and medical science. Their presuppositions, all readily challenged, are problematic for all of medicine including psychiatry. Physicians treat persons, not diseases; people go to the doctor with ailments and illnesses, not diseases; mental illnesses are not necessarily diseases; medicine is a social response to human need, not a pure science; medical science is a practical, not a pure, science. What is true for medicine in general is, of course, also true for psychiatry.

Key Words: Szasz • Torrey • psychiatry • antipsychiatry • phenomenology

Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Vol. 45, No. 3, 403-415 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/0022167805277267
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[Abstract] [PDF]