9 quotes from a renegade psychiatrist

Thomas Szasz on how to live.

The controversial psychiatrist Thomas Szasz found much to respect in the Stoics.

The Stoics highlighted that it’s what we think and do that matters, not how others define us. Whether or not we live well isn’t due to fortune, the gods, or our genetic dispositions. It’s due to our choices. Szasz agrees – he celebrated human agency. In fact, in a personal letter he recommended the writings of the Stoic philosophers (especially Seneca).

Thomas Szasz’s most well known work, The Myth of Mental Illness, argues that the idea of mental illness isn’t like other kinds of illness. Instead, it’s a kind of story we tell ourselves that has more to do with problems of life than an identifiable scientific condition. Back in the day, we blamed ‘mental illnesses’ on humors and demonic influence. Then unconscious complexes. Then ‘chemical imbalances’—a scientific-sounding term that doesn’t actually mean anything. Today we blame an unidentifiable mix of social and polygenic causes.

Anyway, that’s a fascinating topic, but whatever you think of his take on that matter, he was an excellent aphorist. His aphorisms are a much better way into his thought than works like the The Myth of Mental Illness – they support Stoicism and challenge convention in equal measure.

Here are 9 for you to ponder, from his work Words to the Wise: A Medical-Philosophical Dictionary.

Self-discipline enables us to choose whether to yield to or resist particular inclinations. Our choices determine what we do and who we are.

Only a self-disciplined person can be obedient; and only such a person can be autonomous.

The word “crisis” comes from the Greek for choice or crossroads. Its core meanings are choice, challenge, opportunity, and risk. It is significant that we use the word to mean disaster, catastrophe, emergency, plight, and predicament.

The popular phrase, “death with dignity,” is misleading. It is not just that people want to die with dignity, but rather that they want to live with it. It is because many people live without dignity that they also die without it. Dying, after all, is a part of life, not death.

People have diverse, mutually incompatible desires—for liberty and equality, adventure and security, autonomy and intimacy.

In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.

“He who excuses himself, accuses himself,” says a French proverb. The person who speaks in the language of excuses—blaming his misbehavior on addiction, disability, illness, mental illness, ignorance, poverty—begins the struggle for self-control by self-defeat.

People love liberty because it protects them from control and humiliation by others, affording them the possibility of dignity. People loathe liberty because it throws them back on their own abilities and resources, thus confronting them with the possibility of insignificance and the burden of responsibility.

The greatest analgesic, soporific, stimulant, tranquilizer, narcotic, and even antibiotic known to medicine—in short, the closest thing to a genuine panacea—is work.