AHP Perspective Feb Mar 2012.indd - California Institute of Integral ...

Poetic Tribute to Thomas S. Szasz, T.S.S. (Truth’s Sweet Sound)
This tribute comprises the titles of his thirty-five books (as of October 2011) and some of his many ideas.
Let us now salute a humanist, a valiant libertarian,
iconoclast, psychiatrist, learned writer and contrarian.
To foes and fans, respectively, he brings both Pain And Pleasure,
and for those who mind respectfully, he’s an intellectual treasure.
Self-acknowledged friends of liberty are well advised to heed him
if they don’t know how psychiatry’s a threat to Faith In Freedom.
His detractors deign to denigrate and call him “paranoid”
(a defamatory label slapped on those deemed “Anti-Freud”).
He has called psychiatry “quackery” on more than one occasion;
Antipsychiatry: Quackery Squared is just another variation
of this paternalist, determinist, elite epistemology,
institutionalized inhumanity and gravely flawed ontology.
For over fifty years he’s dared to speak words most audacious
against The Therapeutic State: those medically mendacious
practitioners of psychobabble and Psychiatric Slavery,
The Manufacture of Madness and other forms of human knavery;
those soul doctors and inquisitors, who judge both good and badness,
those definers of normality in this, The Age of Madness.
His Untamed Tongue hurls Heresies against their pompous piety,
and false idols like Schizophrenia: Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry;
against Ceremonial Chemistry, through which Our Right to Drugs
is politically abrogated by the state’s coercive thugs;
against electroshock, lobotomy, outrageous Cruel Compassion,
and chemical strait-jackets, “therapeutically” in fashion.
“It’s our intent to save,” protests this pseudo-medical profession,
(just like the slave’s) the madman’s Liberation by Oppression.
The “prescription” is Coercion As Cure for that most disturbing
misbehavior that some other folks are having trouble curbing.
A quick peek inside their Lexicon of Lunacy is revealing:
They claim “it’s for the patient’s good” to hurt instead of healing!
In the name game they’re the champions, inventive and prolific,
and this game’s named “diagnosis”; doesn’t that sound scientific?
They say good behavior’s healthy, bad behavior’s a disease,
and excessive bad behavior’s an addiction, if you please!
If you’re focused they’ll profess that you “obsess compulsively”;
if you’re not, why then, they’ll diagnose a “case” of “ADD.”
It’s disease that we prevent and it is crime that we prohibit,
and deciding which response we make starts with the name we give it.
Call expressing one’s own death wish “suicidal ideation,”
and they symptomize a thought—by psychiatric imputation.
The “prevention” of self-killing is what he calls Suicide
Prohibition and, to clarify what doctors have belied,
he points out that, when demedicalizing social power games,
we should start with truthful language: Call things by their proper names.
Sometimes doctor and his patient will use language to deceive;
the semantic antics make it hard to know whom to believe.
For to claim “My Madness Saved Me” all depends on how you spin it;
as manipulative strategy, there’s certainly method in it.
In addition to the name game, there’s another that they play;
this rendition’s called the blame game, and the gambit’s to portray
some hapless person as the scapegoat for some other’s sin and vice,
and then purge society’s problems via ritual sacrifice.
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ahp PERSPECTIVE
FEBRUARY / MARCH 2012