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Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.

—Thomas Szasz

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About Thomas Szasz

Portrait of Thomas Szasz

Thomas Stephen Szasz ( SAHSS; Hungarian: Szász Tamás István [saːs]; 15 April 1920 – 8 September 2012) was a Hungarian-American academic and psychiatrist. He served for most of his career as professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University. A distinguished lifetime fellow of the...

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Why do children want to grow up?  Because they experience their lives as constrained by immaturity and perceive adulthood as a condition of greater freedom and opportunity. But what is there today, in America, that . . . adolescents want to do but cannot do? Not much: they can do drugs, have sex, make babies, and get money. . . . For such adolescents, adulthood becomes synonymous with responsibility rather than liberty. Is it any surprise that they remain adolescents?

—Thomas Szasz

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Being considered or labeled mentally disordered — abnormal, crazy, mad, psychotic, sick, it matters not what variant is used — is the most profoundly discrediting classification that can be imposed on a person today. Mental illness casts the "patient" out of our social order just as surely as heresy cast the "witch" out of medieval society. That, indeed, is the very purpose of stigma terms.

—Thomas Szasz

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society stigma illness mental illness
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