The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement. Thomas S. Szasz. New York:  Harper and Row, 1970.  xxvii+381 pp.

This book is a passionate indictment against the victimization of so-called

mental patients, especially their involuntary hospitalization, a process which deprives them of their basic rights as human beings and as citizens. The subtitle to the book describes its approach. The author's theme is that the attitude toward the mentally ill is similar to that once taken toward witches. He sees the Mental Health Movement as filling the same role which the Inquisition did in the Middle Ages when it persecuted so-called heretics, chiefly witches and Jews. In both situations the victims served as scapegoats for society and also as objects for the sadistic impulses and power needs of those in control. Both situations expressed the continuing human history of the oppressors against the oppressed.

The author states repeatedly that there is no such entity as mental illness in the sense of a disease of the body. In an earlier volume, The Myth of Mental Illness, he explains more fully his view that mental disturbances can better be defined as expressions of problems in living. The purpose of the deviant speech and behavior can be understood as efforts of the person to communicate, both with himself and others. It is a kind of game-playing, a paradigm which Dr. Szasz uses for all behavior in which the disturbed individual seeks to have his needs understood and met but cannot use the conventional means of expressing himself. The appropriate treatment is a dialogue between patient and therapist in a private setting, where the autonomy of the patient is fully respected. The verbal expressions of the patient must be understood by the therapist and translated into the language of everyday life.

The Manufacture of Madness expresses the concept that the state of mental illness is a condition ascribed to certain people by others. Since no such illness actually exists, any more than the state of being a witch existed, madness is manufactured by those utilizing this false label. It is the psy