Thomas Szasz

I've always wondered how Thomas Szasz, who had been trained as a psychiatrist, could hold to his outlandish claims that psychoses such as schizophrenia do not exist. Would not the exposure to psychotic patients during training have shown Szasz the error of his ideology? It turns out that Szasz may not have had much exposure to psychotics. In a 1997 interview, he describes how he consciously selected a psychiatric residency “that did not include work with involuntary patients.” The chairman of the Psychiatry Department told him, “Tom, you have only one year left of your residency. I don’t think it’s right that you should finish without any experience with psychotic patients. I think you should do your third year at the Cook County Hospital.” So Szasz quit, and went elsewhere to avoid getting any experience with psychotic patients.

Szasz was drafted into the Navy after completing his training, and his experiences there almost certainly reinforced his already well developed belief that mental illness did not exist. “The servicemen didn’t want to be in the Navy and played the role of mental patient. I didn’t want to be in the Navy and played the role of military psychiatrist: My job was to discharge the men from the Service as ‘neuropsychiatric casualties’.”

Szasz had gone out of his way to avoid seeing psychotic patients, and then took a job that he describes as certifying that sane people pretending to insane were actually insane. There's something worse than being ignorant--and that's going out of your way to stay ignorant.