For St Augustine, sexual desire was a disease; to the great doctors of coitus today, lack of sexual desire is a disease. For Dr Szasz, both these presumptions are absurd and unscientific. He argues persuasively that human sexuality - however it may be expressed - reveals and reflects who we are and who we want to be. There are no sexual disorders that need to be cured by sex therapies - there is only the never-ending task of having to develop and shape our lives. Szasz maintains that we evade that task by handing the management of our sexual lives over to sex education and sex therapists.

This volume contains the earliest essays, going back more than thirty years, in which the author staked out his position on 'the nature, scope, methods, and values of psychiatry.'

In Our Right to Drugs, Szasz shows how the present drug war started at the beginning of this century, when the US government first assumed the task of protecting people from patent medicines. By the end of World War I the free market in drugs was but a dim memory. Instead of dwelling on the familiar impracticality and unfairness of drug laws, Szasz demonstrates the deleterious effects of prescription laws, which place people under lifelong medical supervision. The result is that most Americans today prefer a coercive and corrupt command drug economy to a free market in drugs.

The idea of insanity pervades every aspect of our daily lives. Thomas Szasz contends that the term actually functions as a euphemism for problems in living, as an excuse for crime and misbehaviour, as a stigma for invalidating adversaries - and, generally, as a metaphor and legal fiction.

Every age, labels others to a particular fate, such as the witch consigned to the fire. The priest has now been replaced by the psychiatrist and this text examines the role of medicine as a more insidious tyrant than religion, as it claims to be beneficial to both the patient and the commonwealth.

This is a defence of every individual's right to choose a voluntary death. By maintaining statutes that determine that voluntary death is not legal, Thomas Szasz believes that our society is forfeiting one of its basic freedoms and causing the psychiatric medical establishment to treat individuals in a manner that is disturbingly inhumane.

In this polemical response to the controversy about drug use and drug criminalization, Thomas Szasz suggests that governments have overstepped their bounds in labelling and prohibiting certain drugs as dangerous substances and incarcerating addicts in order to cure them.

Thomas Szasz has been challenging the very existence of "mental illness" for over twenty-five years. His advocacy of freedom of choice and the abolition of involuntary psychiatry has made him America's most controversial psychiatrist.
The Therapeutic State is a unique collection of topical essays about what the author calls "one of the grandest illusions of our age, mental illness, and the quixotic crusade against it." Pivoting his analysis on news-making events, Szasz exposes the fallacies of our present penchant for interpreting the behavior of "sane" persons as goal-directed and...

This provocative and controversial book rejects the popular pablum of more laws, more money, more enforcement personnel, and more jails as the road to victory in the "war on drugs." Author Steven Wisotsky masterfully documents the failure of the drug war and the erroneous premise central to its destructive and doomed strategy: the idea that drug taking controls human behavior; that drugs "cause" physical dependency. Americans must move beyond the war on drugs by repudiating their obsessive preoccupation with controlling or prohibiting drugs. Instead, we must replace this mindset with a new...