• By pretending that convention is Nature, that disobeying a personal prohibition is a medical illness, they establish themselves as agents of social control and at the same time disguise their punitive interventions in the semantic and social trappings of medical practice.

    Thomas Szasz: By pretending that convention is Nature, that disobeying a personal prohibition is a medical illness, they establish themselves as agents of social control and at the same time disguise their punitive interventions in the semantic and social trappings of medical practice.
    Thomas Stephen Szasz (1997). “The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement”, p.167, Syracuse University Press