The Medicalization of Everyday Life: Selected Essays

This collection of impassioned essays, published between 1973 and 2006, chronicles Thomas Szasz's long campaign against the orthodoxies of pharmacracy, that is, the alliance of medicine and the state. From Diagnoses Are Not Diseases to The Existential Identity Thief, Fatal Temptation, and Killing as Therapy, the book delves into the complex evolution of medicalization, concluding with Pharmacracy: The New Despotism. In practice, society must draw a line between what counts as medical practice and what does not. Where it draws that line goes far in defining the kinds of laws its citizens live under, the kinds of medical care they receive, and the kinds of lives they are allowed to live.