Synopses & Reviews
Fatal Freedom is an eloquent defense of every individual's right to choose a voluntary death. The author, a renowned psychiatrist, believes that we can speak about suicide calmly and rationally, as he does in this book, and that we can ultimately accept suicide as part of the human condition. By maintaining statutes that determine that voluntary death is not legal, our society is forfeiting one of its basic freedoms and causing the psychiatric/medical establishment to treat individuals in a manner that is disturbingly inhumane according to Dr. Szasz. His important work asks and points to clear, intelligent answers to some of the most significant ethical questions of our time:
• Is suicide a voluntary act?
• Should physicians be permitted to prevent it?
• Should they be authorized to abet it?
The author's thoughtful analysis of these questions consistently holds forth patient autonomy as paramount; therefore, he argues, patients should not be prevented from exercising their free will, nor should physicians be permitted to enter the process by prescribing or providing the means for voluntary death.
Dr. Szasz predicts that we will look back at our present prohibitory policies toward suicide with the same amazed disapproval with which we regard past policies toward homosexuality, masturbation, and birth control. This comparison with other practices that started as sins, became crimes, then were regarded as mental illnesses, and are now becoming more widely accepted, opens up the discussion and understanding of suicide in a historical context. The book explores attitudes toward suicide held by the ancient Greeks and Romans, through early Christianity and the Reformation, to the advent of modern psychiatry and contemporary society as a whole. Our tendency to define disapproved behaviors as diseases has created a psychiatric establishment that exerts far too much influence over how and when we choose to die. Just as we have come to accept the individual's right to birth control, so too must we accept his right to death control before we can call our society humane or free.
Review
One can read this book from the perspective of moral philosophy, political science or clinical medicine....Fatal Freedom is a very serviceable book for physicians, who in one way or the other have to deal with suicide in their medical practice.Medical Sentinel
Review
Szasz strikes yet another blow for clarity, dignity, and liberty. When we finally break out of our bad habit of medicalizing moral choice, Thomas Szasz will garner well-earned laurels for having shown us that tyranny administered by doctors with good bedside manners is tyranny nonetheless.Sheldon Richman, Editor The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty
Review
Fatal Freedom deepens Szasz's commitment and our understanding of what might be called the libertarian tradition. In considering the theme of suicide as part of the larger question of the place of State power in individual decision-making he has made a genuine contribution in advancing the current discourse on matters of profound moment to us all.Irving Louis Horowitz Professor of Sociology &Political Science Rutgers University
Review
This is an important book written with the clarity and unassailable logic which we have come to associate with Szasz. It is a work of scholarship which is immediately accessible and addresses a major issue in our society. It must be read!Professor James McCormick Trinity College, University of Dublin
Review
Szasz demonstrates cogently the rhetoric of suicide by which the decision to end one's life is erroneously depicted as a problem or a disease, which must be solved or cured.Richard E. Vatz Professor of Rhetoric and Communication, Towson University
Synopsis
This eloquent defense of every individual's right to choose a voluntary death will contribute greatly to the debates of some of the most significant ethical issues facing our society: the right to suicide, physician-assisted suicide, psychiatric intervention for suicidal patients, and euthanasia.
Synopsis
Fatal Freedom is an eloquent defense of every individual's right to choose a voluntary death. The author, a renowned psychiatrist, believes that we can speak about suicide calmly and rationally, as he does in this book, and that we can ultimately accept suicide as part of the human condition. By maintaining statutes that determine that voluntary death is not legal, our society is forfeiting one of its basic freedoms and causing the psychiatric/medical establishment to treat individuals in a manner that is disturbingly inhumane according to Dr. Szasz. His important work asks and points to clear, intelligent answers to some of the most significant ethical questions of our time: - Is suicide a voluntary act? - Should physicians be permitted to prevent it? - Should they be authorized to abet it? The author's thoughtful analysis of these questions consistently holds forth patient autonomy as paramount; therefore, he argues, patients should not be prevented from exercising their free will, nor should physicians be permitted to enter the process by prescribing or providing the means for voluntary death.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [157]-167) and index.
About the Author
THOMAS SZASZ is Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus at State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse.
Table of Contents
Preface
Speaking of Suicide: Our Self-Mutilated Vocabulary
Constructing Suicide: What Counts as Killing Oneself?
Excusing Suicide: The Fateful Evasion
"Preventing" Suicide: "Saving" Lives
Prescribing Suicide: Death as Treatment
Perverting Suicide: Killing as Treatment
Rethinking Suicide: Death Control, The Final Responsibility
Appendix
Bibliography
Indexes