Thomas Szasz

A psychiatrist who spent his career arguing against his own profession's core premise: that mental illness is a disease like any other. Szasz insisted the label was too often used to justify locking people up without trial, and became a prominent voice against involuntary commitment and coerced treatment in twentieth-century American medicine — while continuing to practice consensual psychotherapy himself and rejecting the "anti-psychiatry" label others pinned on him. A longtime professor at SUNY Upstate Medical University, he remained a distinguished fellow of the American Psychiatric Association even as he attacked its foundations.