We have been through many adventures together now, and I will cherish the memories of those times for years to come.

Rather than reminisce about the past, I’d like to use this opportunity to briefly reiterate the values we share here tonight.

The public health movement--encompassing, or perhaps growing out of, psychiatry--is now our greatest threat.

The public health movement is the greatest threat to liberty.

Moral management masquerades as medicine. You predicted this in 1963 when you wrote:

"Although we may not know it, we have, in our day, witnessed the birth of the Therapeutic State. This is perhaps the major implication of psychiatry as an institution of social control."

[--Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry: An Inquiry Into the Social Uses of Mental Health Practices,
The Macmillan Company, New York, 1963, p. 212]

Today, many people are simultaneously copying what you said then, and punishing you for saying it.

It is an odd thing: On the one hand you are the problem who won’t go away for so many people who believe in mental illness. On the other hand you are Ralph Ellison’s "invisible man." People act as if mental illness exists, and as if you don’t exist.

You were nearly fired from Upstate after The Myth of Mental Illness was published. It was a close call. How might things be different if they were successful back then?

People denounced and diagnosed you. Diagnosis is a weapon.

And still you go on, writing book after book.

There is no half-way when it comes to your ideas, Tom. One is either with us or against us.

You have bravely shown us how mental illness cannot exist, and how the involuntary commitment to prisons called hospitals is scapegoating and an unconstitutional deprivation of liberty.

You have shown us how the insanity defense and all of its variations is a deprivation of justice. For “if those who break the law go unpunished, those who obey the law are surely cheated.”

And you have shown us over and over how the idea of mental illness is used to undermine the rule of law.

The rule of law is a rule of reciprocity, the golden rule, and obeying the law must mean something. Otherwise, law means nothing, and people will break the law.

Thank you for your integrity, Tom, and for never selling out, for never working both sides of the street.

It’s been a hard road, to be sure, and you have done the right thing. You have set a good example for all of us to follow.

All I can offer now in exchange is a humble "thank you," and a hearty "Happy Birthday" on this your 85th.

Happy Birthday!

--Jeff

Thomas S. Szasz Cybercenter for Liberty and Responsibility:
Copyright © 1998-2010 by the author of each page, except where noted. All rights reserved.