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.
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.
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
Reviews
An intelligent critique of the cultural misunderstanding of suicide....Szasz is particularly persuasive in hacking through the thicket of medical ethics in right to die circumstances.—Kirkus Reviews
Endorsements
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^LThe Freeman: Ideas on Liberty
^IFatal Freedom^R 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^LProfessor of Sociology & Political Science^LRutgers University
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^LTrinity College, University of Dublin
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^LProfessor of Rhetoric and Communication, Towson University
Thomas Szasz is one of the great independent minds of our age. Once again he has made us think, and about a central moral problem of human existence.—Geoffrey Wheatcroft, journalist and author
