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The Myth of Psychotherapy audiobook cover art

  • The Myth of Psychotherapy

  • Mental Healing as Religion, Rhetoric, and Repression
  • By: Thomas Szasz
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  • Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
  • Unabridged
  • Overall
    4.5 out of 5 stars 23
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    5 out of 5 stars 14

Until recent years, “bad” and “immoral” were the terms used to describe people who are now referred to as “sick” and “in need of treatment.” Moral and religious perspective has been replaced by medical and therapeutic rhetoric. It is little wonder why the world is plagued by legions of rapists, drug users, murderers, thieves, and child abusers, all of whom are now referred to as having one form or another of “addiction” and are thus either “sick” or suffering from “mental illness.”

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Psychiatry audiobook cover art

  • Psychiatry

  • The Science of Lies
  • By: Thomas Szasz
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  • Unabridged
  • Overall
    3.5 out of 5 stars 42
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    4 out of 5 stars 27
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For more than half a century, Thomas Szasz has devoted much of his career to a radical critique of psychiatry. His latest work, Psychiatry: The Science of Lies, is a culmination of his life’s work: to portray the integral role of deception in the history and practice of psychiatry. Szasz argues that the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness stands in the same relationship to the diagnosis and treatment of bodily illness that the forgery of a painting does to the original masterpiece.

  • 2 out of 5 stars

  • Over four hours of rant, with lack of rationale

  • By Michael on 04-11-12
Mad in America audiobook cover art

  • Mad in America

  • Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill
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    4.5 out of 5 stars 81
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    4.5 out of 5 stars 69
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Schizophrenics in the United States currently fare worse than patients in the world’s poorest countries. In Mad in America, medical journalist Robert Whitaker argues that modern treatments for the severely mentally ill are just old medicine in new bottles, and that we as a society are deeply deluded about their efficacy. The widespread use of lobotomies in the 1920s and 1930s gave way in the 1950s to electroshock and a wave of new drugs.

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Maps of Meaning audiobook cover art

  • Maps of Meaning

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From the author of 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos comes a provocative hypothesis that explores the connection between what modern neuropsychology tells us about the brain and what rituals, myths, and religious stories have long narrated. A cutting-edge work that brings together neuropsychology, cognitive science, and Freudian and Jungian approaches to mythology and narrative, Maps of Meaning presents a rich theory that makes the wisdom and meaning of myth accessible to the critical modern mind.

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The Book of Woe audiobook cover art

  • The Book of Woe

  • The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry
  • By: Gary Greenberg
  • Narrated by: David Drummond
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  • Unabridged
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    4 out of 5 stars 44
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For more than two years, author and psychotherapist Gary Greenberg has embedded himself in the war that broke out over the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM) - the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) compendium of mental illnesses and what Greenberg calls "the book of woe". Since its debut in 1952, the book has been frequently revised, and with each revision, the "official" view on which psychological problems constitute mental illness has changed.

  • 2 out of 5 stars

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Anatomy of an Epidemic audiobook cover art

  • Anatomy of an Epidemic

  • Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America
  • By: Robert Whitaker
  • Narrated by: Ken Kliban
  • Length: 13 hrs and 57 mins
  • Unabridged
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    4.5 out of 5 stars 382
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In this astonishing and startling book, award-winning science and history writer Robert Whitaker investigates a medical mystery: Why has the number of disabled mentally ill in the United States tripled over the past two decades? Every day, 1,100 adults and children are added to the government disability rolls because they have become newly disabled by mental illness, with this epidemic spreading most rapidly among our nations children. What is going on?

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Publisher's Summary

Defining "medicalization" as the perception of nonmedical conditions as medical problems and nondiseases as diseases, Thomas Szasz has devoted much of his career to exposing the dangers of "medicalizing" the conditions of some who simply refuse to conform to society's expectations.

Szasz argues that modern psychiatry's tireless ambition to explain the human condition has led to the treatment of life's difficulties and oddities as clinical illnesses rather than as humanity revealed in its fullness.

This collection of impassioned essays, published between 1973 and 2006, chronicles the author's long campaign against the orthodoxies of psychiatry. From "Medicine to Magic" to "Medicine as Social Control", the audiobook delves into the fascinating history of medicalization, including "The Discovery of Drug Addiction", "Persecutions for Witchcraft and Drugcraft", and "Food Abuse and Foodaholism".

In a society that has little tolerance for those who live outside its rules, Dr. Szasz's writings are as relevant today as ever.

©2007 Thomas Szasz (P)2014 Redwood Audiobooks

Critic Reviews

"This is a wonderful, impassioned book that is, considering the recent media attention to psychopharmaceuticals, a welcome investigation of the social ramifications involved." ( Publishers Weekly)

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

good book

good book. read it. outlaw psychiatric slavery and psychiatric oppression.

Read Thomas Szaszs other books

I recommend Fatal Freedom, insanity and suicide Prohibition. read all his books

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

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    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Weird

This guy has never met a person with schizophrenia. He also speaks about abolishing the insanity plea without any critique of the prison industrial complex. Dr. Szasz, we are already living in a world where people with mentally illness languish in prison and suffer through poverty. Does this mean you were right?

0 of 1 people found this review helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars

A convincing piece for Capitalist Medicine

This is an excellent book that, via deductive logic and rationale thought dispels the idea that a state-run medical system is the only system. These systems will all evolve back to a free market over time.

0 of 1 people found this review helpful

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  • Alan Michael Forrester
  • 12-26-16

An overview of Szasz's ideas

"The Medicalization of Everyday Life" contains a selection of Szasz's essays about how moral and political disagreements are often portrayed as medical problems rather than problems in living. The narrator is clear and can be easily understood. It is an excellent book to listen to if you want to get an impression of the full scope of Szasz's ideas so that you can decide what other Szasz books you might like to read.

Psychiatry is a prominent example of medicalisation. Jim is behaving in a way that Jill dislikes. Instead of discussing Jim's behaviour or leaving Jim, Jill calls in a psychiatrist who declares Jim mentally ill. Thus a moral problem is obfuscated by portraying it as a medical problem.

Another example is that people are uncomfortable with discussing suicide. So instead of discussing the reasons why a person might commit suicide we try to deprive people of the means to commit suicide. Two policies used to do this are drug prohibition and involuntary commitment for dangerousness to yourself or others.

These positions and many others are explained in this book in more depth and with greater clarity than is possible in a book review. Anybody who wants to be challenged to think more about the ways in which we deny personal responsibility and the terrible implications of doing so should listen to this book.

The narration of the book is clear.