ABSTRACT
As he grew up in Europe amidst an outbreak of fascism that eventually precipitated World War II, Thomas Szasz came face-to-face with the “invincible social power of false truths” (Szasz, 2004a, p. 27). Along with the racial and authoritarian “false truths” of the day, he saw that tyrannical regimes sometimes labeled deviations from their norms as “mental illnesses” so that doctors could “cure” them by coercive and often harmful medical interventions.
