An accessible history of Western attitudes toward insanity, this haunting book traces over three centuries of horrific treatments for madness, raising important questions about our obligations to the mad, what it means to be "insane," and what we value most about the human mind.

A classic work by Dr. Thomas Szasz that has revolutionized thinking throughout the Western world about the nature of the psychiatric profession and the moral implications of its practices.

Szasz challenges the way both science and society define insanity, showing how the concept of insanity relates to and differs from ideas of bodily illness, social deviance, and the sick role.

Psychiatric reformer Peter Breggin attacks the popular view that neuroses and psychoses are diseases that are best treated by drugs. He advocates psychotherapy as the modern substitute.

Dr. Szasz discusses how the idiom, imagery, and technology of medicine have been taken over by politics and society, and how this shift has essentially broadened and weakened the concept of disease.

This book examines records of insanity in Western countries over a 250-year period, concluding that insanity is an unrecognized, modern-day plague. The authors insist upon the biological reality of insanity and examine the reasons why epidemic insanity has been so profoundly misunderstood.

Manufacturing Victims: What The Psychology Industry Is Doing To Peopledescribes the various types of psychological techniques and assumptions that create and cater to "victims", often to the damage of the patient, thedivision of families, the distortion of justice, the destruction of businesses, and the weakening of the nation. Individual chapters address Victim Making; Fabricated Victims; The Growth of the Psychology Industry; Selling Psychology as Science; The Business of Psychology; The Technology of Victim Making; and Talking Back Our Private Lives. Manufacturing Victims is a serious and long needed assessment of what is happening with increasing frequency in this lucrative and widespread area of mental health services.