Dear friends and colleagues,

I am sorry to report very sad news; Dr. Thomas Szasz passed away over the weekend.  Our most recent information is that the family is not planning calling hours, but will be having a memorial service within the next six months.  An obituary will also be printed, to include information regarding charitable donations.

Dr. Szasz was born in Hungary and joined our faculty as a Professor in 1956 after being trained as an analyst in the avant-garde Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis.  He continued his long association with Upstate, becoming Professor Emeritus after retirement.  By the time of retirement, he had become one of the most famous psychiatrists in the world, an iconoclastic giant in our field.  He strongly believed in the rights of individuals to make decisions regarding their own health and welfare, and rallied against the hegemony of institutions through presentations and publications.  Dr. Szasz was a prolific scholar, having over 400 published articles and 20 books (at last count).  His most famous work was his brilliant book, The Myth of Mental Illness, in which he cogently argued that psychiatry threatened individual liberties through medical labeling, involuntary commitment, and forced treatment.

In a recent conversation, Dr. Szasz told me he felt he had lost the battle for individual freedoms and felt increasingly alienated from modern psychiatry.  He pointed to the vast expansion of psychiatric diagnoses, the move towards protocol-driven care, and expansion of commitment laws to include sex offenders.  It is my personal hope that as our field moves forward, that our Department can remember the lessons of Dr. Szasz, maintaining the ability to question our practices in a spirit of intellectual inquiry, and remember that our primary responsibility is to relieve the suffering of the individual while maintaining human dignity.

Warm regards,

Robert

Robert Gregory, M.D.
Professor and Interim Chair
Department of Psychiatry
SUNY Upstate Medical University