About Thomas Szasz
Thomas Stephen Szasz 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 American Psychiatric Association and a life member of the American Psychoanalytic Association, he was best known as a social critic of the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry, as what he saw as the social control aims of medicine in modern society, as well as scientism. According to Williams and Caplan, Szasz is "best known for his view that without a diagnosis of neurological disease or damage, a psychiatric diagnosis was meaningless". Szasz first presented his attack on "mental illness" as a legal term in 1958 in the Columbia Law Review. In 1969, Szasz and the Church of Scientology co-founded the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) to oppose involuntary psychiatric treatments. As with those thought bad (insane people), and those who took the wrong drugs (drug addicts), medicine created a category for those who had the wrong weight (obesity).
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.