The Medicalization of Everyday Life: Selected Essays Book

"The old quacks peddled fake cures to treat real diseases. The new quacks peddle fake diseases to justify chemical pacification and medical coercion. The old quacks were politically harmless. They could harm individuals only with those individuals' consent. The new quacks are a serious threat to individual liberty and personal responsibility. They are agents of the therapeutic state who can and do harm individuals both with and without those individuals' consent. Theocracy is the alliance of religion with the state. Pharmocracy is the alliance of medicine with the state."

"Medicine began with sick persons seeking relief from their suffering. Psychiatry began with the relatives of unwanted, troublesome persons seeking relief from the embarrassment and suffering their kin caused them."

"To see through the confusions embodied in the image of the mentally ill person as 'not himself' we must be clear about the connection between behavior and disease. Every part of our body influences our behavior. If we have arthritis, we cannot move normally. If we have glaocaoma we cannot see normally. The organ affecting behavior most directly is the brain. If it is seriously damaged we die. If less seriously damaged, we lose a wide range of bodily functions, such as the ability to see or speak. The question we must keep in mind is: When and why do we attribute a persons behavior to brain disease and when and why do we not do so? Briefly: The answer is that we often attribute bad behavior to disease to excuse the agent, never attribute good behavior to disease lest we deprive the agent of credit, and typically attribute good behavior to free will and insist that bad behavior called "mental illness" is a no-fault act of nature."

"At the beginning of the trade in lunacy the individuals incarcerated as insane were members of the propertied classes who posed a problem to their families. The sane relatives' problem was not finding a home for a homeless person, but finding a justification of removing the lawful occupant of a home from his residence and relocating him...."

"The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog." [Gilbert K Chesterton]

"Physicians, especially psychiatrists, have been waging war on autonomy for more than 200 years."

"Physicians attacked autonomy along three fronts, corresponding to three basic human urges--sex, drugs, and death. Supported by pseudoscience and the state, they declared self-abuse, self-medication, and self-killing diseases and punished them as offenses against public health and hence the public good. The free man owns himself. The therapeutic state prohibits self-ownership."