by Thomas S. Szasz

About the author: Thomas S. Szasz is a psychiatrist and the author of a number of books, including Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry; Psychiatric Justice; Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences; and Psychiatric Slavery.

Psychiatric slavery—that is, confining individuals in madhouses—began in the seventeenth century, grew in the eighteenth, and became an accepted social custom in the nineteenth century. Because the practice entails depriving individuals innocent of lawbreaking of liberty, it requires appropriate moral and legal justification. The history of psychiatry—especially in its relation to law—is largely the story of changing justifications for psychiatric incarceration. The metamorphosis of one criterion for commitment into another is typically called “psychiatric reform.” It is nothing of the kind. The bottom line of the psychiatric balance...