There should not be one law for the mentally ill and another for the sane. To the extent that a person acts involuntarily, he cannot be regarded, in the social sense of the term, as a human being. This, he says leads to a dilemma in court cases, because when we regard an offender as insane and officially excuse him of his crime, we still punish him by treating him as someone less than human. The solution, for Szasz, is to treat all offenders as sane and punish them in the normal way. Anthony Clare says he cannot understand why someone who acts involuntarily has to be regarded as any less than human.
Many patients do experience the process of being treated as mentally ill as a dehumanising one.
In this he defended compulsion, against the criticisms made by Szasz. I want to illustrate his case by looking at what he and Szasz say about the issue of suicide. Psychiatry is only relevant to suicide if mental disturbance led the victim to take his own life. An empirical study cited by Clare suggests this is often the case. Szasz argues that people who want to commit suicide should be allowed to, even if they are mentally disturbed.