Totalitarian medicine.(Letters to the Editor)(Letter to the Editor)

You are to be highly congratulated for your excellent articles "Psychiatry and the State" and its companion "Planned Therapeutic Nanny State" (THE NEW AMERICAN, November 15 issue). Few publications exhibit your insight into the threat to individual liberty posed by psychiatry. Since I am pictured in the second article (bullhorn in hand) and our co-founder, Dr. Thomas Szasz, is featured in your main article, I felt it appropriate to comment.

Your assessment of the subjective nature of psychiatric diagnosis goes to the heart of the problem. Psychiatrists literally vote their "mental disorders" into the profession's billing bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. So, "mental illness" is in the eye of the beholder--the psychiatrist, in whose interest it is to find the person "ill." As Dr. Szasz points out, "mental illnesses" are simply labels given to behaviors--behaviors that someone doesn't like.

Most people do not understand that there is no science to psychiatry. It is an emperor with no clothes--stark naked. Yet today, the child who fidgets or butts into line gets labeled with "attention deficit disorder" and put on one of the psychiatrist's mind-altering drugs--drugs in the same class as opium, morphine, and cocaine. An estimated 10 million children are on ...