num_pages: 160
description: In Western thought suicide has evolved from sin to sinandcrime to crime to mental illness and to semilegal act. A legal act is one we are free to think and speak about and plan and perform without penalty by agents of the state.While dying voluntarily is ostensibly legal suicide attempts and even suicidal thoughts are routinely punished by incarceration in a psychiatric institution. Although many people believe the prevention of suicide is one of the duties the modern state owes its citizens Szasz argues that suicide is a basic human right and that the lengths to which the medical industry goes to prevent it represent a deprivation of that right.Drawing on his general theory of the myth of mental illness Szasz makes a compelling case that the voluntary termination of ones own life is the result of a decision not a disease. He presents an in-depth examination and critique of contemporary antisuicide policies which are based on the notion that voluntary death is a mental health problem and systematically lays out the dehumanizing consequences of psychiatrizing suicide prevention.If suicide be deemed a problem it is not a medical problem. Managing it as if it were a disease or the result of a disease will succeed only in debasing medicine and corrupting the law. Pretending to be the pride of medicine psychiatry is its shame.
language: English
title: Suicide Prohibition: The Shame of Medicine
publisher: Syracuse University Press