Thomas szasz quotes
- •
Diversity in Medicine and Science at Upstate
Thomas Stephen Szasz is one of the most controversial thinkers in behavioral science and a professor emeritus of psychiatry at Upstate. Dr. Szasz is a Hungarian-American psychiatrist who was born on April 15, 1920, in Budapest, Hungary, and emigrated to the United States in 1938. He graduated from the University of Cincinnati with an undergraduate degree in physics in 1941. He was valedictorian of the medical school three years later and received his medical degree from the same university in 1944. Dr. Szasz completed a medical internship at Boston City Hospital and a psychiatry residence at the University of Chicago before training as an analyst in the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis in 1951. In 1954, he joined the United States Naval Medical Center as the psychiatrist in charge of the Enlisted Psychiatric Services in Bethesda, Maryland.
Dr. Szasz joined the faculty of SUNY Upstate as a professor of psychiatry in 1956. Dr. Szasz wrote 20 books with such a title as “The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of
- •
Thomas Szasz
Hungarian-American psychiatrist and activist (1920–2012)
Thomas Stephen Szasz (SAHSS; Hungarian: Szász Tamás István[saːs]; 15 April 1920 – 8 September 2012) was a Hungarian-American academic and psychiatrist. He served for most of his career as professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University.[2] A distinguished lifetime fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a life member of the American Psychoanalytic Association, he was best known as a social critic of the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry, as what he saw as the social control aims of medicine in modern society, as well as scientism.
Szasz maintained throughout his career that he was not anti-psychiatry but rather that he opposed coercive psychiatry. He was a staunch opponent of civil commitment and involuntary psychiatric treatment, but he believed in and practiced psychiatry and psychotherapy between consenting adults.
Life and death
Szasz was born on April 15, 1920, in Budapest, Hungary, the second son of Jewi
- •
Szasz, Thomas Stephen
SZASZ, THOMAS STEPHEN (1920–), U.S. psychiatrist and writer. Born in Budapest, Hungary, Szasz graduated from the Royal Hungarian Training Institute in Budapest shortly before the Nazi invasion of Austria prompted his family to move to the United States in 1938. He majored in physics at the University of Cincinnati and earned his M.D. degree in 1944. He then chose to specialize in psychiatry and psychoanalysis, training at the University of Chicago.
Szasz remained affiliated to the university's Institute for Psychoanalysis 1950–56, until he was appointed professor of psychiatry at the Upstate Medical Center of the State University of New York.
Szasz was a prolific writer but became well-known and controversial through The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (1961), which called into question many of the fundamental assumptions of psychiatry. He contended that conditions conventionally described by psychiatrists as "mental illness" were more properly characterized as "problems of living" and that the concept of "mental il
Copyright ©damtree.pages.dev 2025