The Manufacture Of Madness
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
What if the entire apparatus of modern psychiatry is not a science of healing, but an instrument of social control — a secular inquisition dressed in the white coat of medicine? In The Manufacture of Madness, Thomas S. Szasz presents one of the most provocative and intellectually daring arguments of the twentieth century: that the institutional persecution of the mentally ill is a direct successor to the Church's persecution of heretics and witches, with the psychiatrist assuming the role once held by the priest and the inquisitor. Drawing a meticulous and damning parallel between the Inquisition and the mental health system, Szasz argues that mental illness is not a biological condition but a social construct — a label deployed to marginalise, silence, and control those who deviate from society's norms. A professor of psychiatry who turned the discipline's assumptions against itself, Szasz writes with the precision of a scholar and the urgency of a dissident, marshalling historical evidence, legal argument, and philosophical critique into a single, devastating indictment. The Manufacture of Madness stands as a landmark of anti-psychiatry thought, sitting alongside the work of Michel Foucault and R.D. Laing as a foundational challenge to the power structures embedded within modern medicine. For anyone who has ever questioned who gets to define sanity — and who profits from the definition — this work remains as unsettling and essential as the day it was first published.
Author: Thomas S. Szasz
Format: Paperback
Genre: Psychology
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
What if the entire apparatus of modern psychiatry is not a science of healing, but an instrument of social control — a secular inquisition dressed in the white coat of medicine? In The Manufacture of Madness, Thomas S. Szasz presents one of the most provocative and intellectually daring arguments of the twentieth century: that the institutional persecution of the mentally ill is a direct successor to the Church's persecution of heretics and witches, with the psychiatrist assuming the role once held by the priest and the inquisitor. Drawing a meticulous and damning parallel between the Inquisition and the mental health system, Szasz argues that mental illness is not a biological condition but a social construct — a label deployed to marginalise, silence, and control those who deviate from society's norms. A professor of psychiatry who turned the discipline's assumptions against itself, Szasz writes with the precision of a scholar and the urgency of a dissident, marshalling historical evidence, legal argument, and philosophical critique into a single, devastating indictment. The Manufacture of Madness stands as a landmark of anti-psychiatry thought, sitting alongside the work of Michel Foucault and R.D. Laing as a foundational challenge to the power structures embedded within modern medicine. For anyone who has ever questioned who gets to define sanity — and who profits from the definition — this work remains as unsettling and essential as the day it was first published.