Sunday 18 October 2009

Quote of the day: Szasz on prayer


If you talk to God, that's called 'prayer.' If God talks to you, that's called 'schizophrenia.' "
……………………………………………………………….psychiatrist Thomas Szasz

2 comments:

Richard McGrath said...

Love the quote, PC. I used it several years ago in a talk to the local medical community on coercive psychiatry.

Dr Szasz has some controversial ideas - e.g. that mental illness is not actually disease as such, but rather a 'problem with living' as he puts it.

He has however left open the possibility that if, with modern imaging techniques, anatomical changes can be linked to what we currently label psychiatric illness, then those illnesses may need to be reclassified as neurological disease.

Put another way, just as meningitis or a glioma can be demonstrated on MRI scans or at autopsy, it is possible that psychiatric illness may be linked to characteristic changes on, say, a PET scan. I think there is some increasing evidence that this may be the case in certain individuals - in which case they have a neurological illness.

Falafulu Fisi said...

My own comment goes like the following:

“If a psychic talks to the dead, that's called 'delusion'. If the dead talk to a psychic, that's called 'fraud'. "