Disclaimer: I take my meds/see a psych regularly and didn’t know who Thomas Szasz even was before I got called a “Szaszian” for writing one of my first mainstream pieces about how involuntary hospitalization is not necessarily good or helpful.
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Can also very much relate to this experience re: Szasz. I’m both ambivalent toward him but also wish more non-disability focused activists/scholars on the left engaged with his writing? He confuses me to put it mildy
I guess what I meant by that is I’m not sure he’s well known across the broader public interest left and his writing illustrates how slippery the slope can get when framing disabilities as strictly social constructs
Szasz was very popular on the right and published in Reason on a semi-regular basis. It makes Republicans’ recent embrace of bringing back institutionalization pretty funny.
I had an interesting conversation with a friend recently about why the IDD and SMI service systems turned out so differently, and part of it may have to do with intellectual leadership of opposition/major reform. Wolfensberger vs. Szasz.
Normalization has a ton of flaws, but the general positive idea was that support services to meaningfully include disabled people in society were and end in and of themselves. SMI service advocacy had a very different trajectory.
Absolutely. This is a question that I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about (primarily from a legal lens) and have resigned myself to believe it was in large part about aesthetic perceptions of I/DD vs SMI and racializing personality disorder criteria in the 60s
I was surprised, at a point when it seemed like a possible outcome, to learn that a)it is almost impossible to get hospitalization for a kid even if they're attempting to burn your house down (a friend's kid) and b)all hospitals do is medicate the kid and send them home to repeat the cycle.
Lots of parents in ER waiting for a psych bed for 48 or more hours and being told go home, no room at the inn. People tell you "why don't you send your kid somewhere to get better" and you're like "what is this, The Bell Jar? Do you have 100K a year for a private place that also might not help?"
I really, really need people to understand that inpatient is not a place people go to get better. It has never been that. A lot of parents seem to have this fantasy that they’ll send their kids away and the kids will come back healed. That is now how it works or how it has ever worked.
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