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
And from a policy perspective the IMD Exclusion enshrined completely cost incentives for I/DD care in the community vs SMI. But that’s the cart not the theory/academic horse
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