Thomas Szasz on Psychiatric Slavery Vis-à-Vis Restoring the African Personality

Backdrop on Thomas Szasz

For Szaszians, Thomas Szasz, MD, (1920-2012) was simply a giant in the world of mental health, perhaps just short of apotheosis. Szasz came to worldwide prominence with his 1961 The Myth of Mental Illness. He unwaveringly through profound prolific analyses penetrated the illusion built up by psychiatric establishmentarianism that it was friend to the populace, working on its behalf and, moreover, knew what was best pertaining to human behavior evaluations. For over 50 years, Szasz was a stalwart if not the leading critic of psychiatric slavery defined as “psychiatric interventions imposed on persons by force” (Szasz, 2002, p. 1). It appears to be the sine qua non of establishment psychiatry (Szasz frequently refers to the entire mental health establishment under this rubric and I do so throughout). Szasz explained and exposed it—perspicaciously and perspicuously—as always unwarrantable and never in the client’s best interest truly. Despite its de facto and increasingly de jure status as psychiatry’s modus operandi, there was never any diffidence in Szasz’s unrelenting criticism. His argument carries force that the standard operating procedure as carried out in establishment psychiatry of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)/International Classification of Diseases (ICD) based diagnosis and resulting treatment—often incorporating incarceration or with incarceration looming—“are masks for justifying coercion as care” (Szasz, 2002, p. 4). When establishment psychiatry did implement reforms these past five decades, Szasz, unlike many, was not befooled as they at best were nominal: “psychiatric reforms are exercises in prettifying plantations” (Szasz, 2002, p. 5). Far from cute but vacuous phrasing, the sublime profundity of the observation lies in Szasz’s impeccable logic that if a situation is fundamentally foul at the root, then nonessential reforms in its institutional structure add up to little or nothing and abet the continuation of status quo. By analogy, how good were reforms lessening or limiting the mistreatment of the enslaved? The case made that psychiatrists by and large are of goodwill, but are caught up in bad institutional circumstances (Rosenhan, 1973) amounts to attempted deflections of Szaszian criticism. It is not unlike the deflection of arguing “good versus bad planter” in evaluating slavery’s merits. Szasz realized this as reflected in his bottom-line statement that

all psychiatry is coercive, actually or potentially . . . psychiatrists [serve as] prostitutes of the dominant ethic [state control of the populace] invent[ing] new diseases, [colluding in] psychiatric-judicial pogrom[s] . . . war[ring] on children . . . with . . . “speed” . . . called “Ritalin,” [all the while employing] . . . justificatory rhetoric, legitimizing civil commitment and . . . involuntary hospitalization . . . power[s] of which psychiatrists must be deprived, just as white men had to be deprived of the power to enslave black men. (Wyatt, 2000, Slavery, Witchcraft, and Psychiatry section, para. 2)

It is this threat to psychiatric slavery—the power base of establishment psychiatry—that may be Szasz’s most enduring and greatest contribution. His criticisms, overall, extend to mental health professions other than psychiatry.

Szasz (n.d.-b, para. 1) warned seriously that “[a]lthough we may not know it, we have, in our day, witnessed the birth of the Therapeutic State. This is perhaps the major implication of psychiatry as an institution of social control.” As if Szasz were a nonentity, psychiatric and psychological establishmentarianism proceeded apace in collusion with state apparatuses for controlling the populace (Citizen’s Commission on Human Rights, 1995; Szasz, n.d.-b, 1984). Along the way, a bull’s-eye was placed on Szasz. Not only were his messages resisted but he was vilified and unfairly labeled an iconoclast. A typical animadversion on Szasz follows:

Szasz is mostly remembered, if he is remembered at all, as the great silly, a flat-earth adherent in the time of telescopes and globes. . . . His voluminous writings largely gather dust . . . [they are] a marker of backwardness against which to measure our enlightenment, his name is a synonym for error. (Oliver, 2006, para. 5)

Because Szasz rejects psychiatric slavery and, moreover, deconstructs the aura of its appropriateness and inevitability that psychiatry has constructed for it, ad hominem and erroneous arguments against him and his positions abound. Some go too far in transparent attempts to isolate Szasz, bring him into disrepute, and alienate professionals and laypersons from him by fulmination: a “common response to Szasz [is] . . . utter disregard. . . . The Szaszians of the world are not just fools but monsters” says Oliver (2006, para. 6). Money (1981) accuses Szasz of self-elevation “to the Aesculapian summit of a new and heretical priesthood-the only single living physician with divine authority to prescribe what is good and bad in sexual morals and professional procedures” (p. 372). Who is Belial here, Szasz or psychiatry’s defenders who attempt to gainsay him? Another below the belt charge leveled at Szasz by psychiatry has been the “antipsychiatry” tag (Szasz, 2008). This is immediately recognizable as a smear by an embarrassed establishment as Szasz has always been unambiguous about his acceptance of legitimate psychiatry (Szasz, 2009). Schaler (2015, para. 6) points out Szasz

believe[s] in psychiatry between consenting adults [but is] . . . opposed to institutional psychiatry and coercion [not] . . . contractual or consensual psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, or counseling . . . as long as the designated client is able to fire his or her therapist at any time.

Roberts (2010, p. 43-44) notes Szasz pointed out

“the antipsychiatry movement” originated [as a defensive tactic] . . . in late nineteenth-century Germany. Then as now the term was employed . . . to “divert people’s attention from the core moral-political problems of psychiatry, coercion and excuse making.” In short it was a dismissive label to prevent serious criticism of psychiatry.

It seems it is the threat Szasz poses to psychiatry’s power by exposing its underbelly to which the execrations may be attributed. Concerning above board criticisms, Szasz has responded with legendary insight, clarification, wit, and aplomb (Schaler, 2004).

Szasz’s Enduring Contribution to Society

Szasz’s works are essential to correcting critical wrongs in the mental health field (G. Alexander, 2000; Szasz, 1998, 2002; Wyatt, 2000). Looking forward, as Szasz clearly has been out front all these years, Borelli’s (2000, para. 13) remark about society seems apt and optimistic:

The collective wisdom of Society will eventually come to terms with Szasz’s radical deconstruction. Only then will Society be able to avoid the terrible consequences of falsifying reality.

As well, G. Alexander (2000, para. 17) remarks on Szasz’s contribution to society:

In the end . . . [i]t will have ripped the mask off the notion of [psychiatry’s] benevolence and clarified the balance the state is trying to strike between individual autonomy and public safety and will have made us much more careful about applications of mental health theory to others.

Huzza for Thomas Szasz as the nobility imbuing his oeuvre seems self-evident (Breeding, 2011; Buchanan-Barker & Barker, 2009; “Liberty and/or Psychiatry,” 2000). Nevertheless, I pause in suspiration wondering if I could ever be a true Szaszian. Qualms arise as several of the Szaszian ideas about society/the state, falsified reality, and its terrible consequences and applications of mental health theory to others actually butt heads with my primary reality, the psycho–cultural–social reality of African descent people (ADP)—including the descendants of those Africans enslaved in the United States (hereafter African-U.S.)—negotiating reality under Eurasian hegemony, which generates its own special truth usually unaccounted for in Eurasian societal analyses, progressive and otherwise.

Szaszian Thought: Jibbing With or Diverging From Dictates of Centered African Personality Theory?

Szaszian thought, though progressive in the Western flow of mental health work, is nonetheless Eurasian-centered throughout. The Eurasian and African cultural centers are not assimilable (Azibo, 1992; Baruti, 2006)—although Hanks (2008), perhaps misguidedly, argues centered African worldview has potential as a next force in Western psychology. The cultural centers diverge as their respective patterns for interpreting reality that give rise to their general designs for living (deep and surface structures of culture, respectively; Nobles, 1982)—which begets both culturally structured thought or utamawazo and utamaroho or distinctive energy signature of the culture (Ani, 1994)—appear in diametric contradiction. Indeed, “[b]rotherhood or equality cannot exist between the Eurasian mentality and the African” (Carruthers, 1980, p. 13). This should not be troubling as respect for the idea of cultural relativity implies the Eurasian and African centers need not be assimilable. Respect for the lodestar idea of pluralism (L. Myers, 1981) should dilute problems that may arise from differences. It implies the African-U.S. have the right to pursue societal orienteering of their choice that might be radically different from any variant of Euro-Americanism. The same might hold to varying extents in most Eurasian nations relative to ADP therein. Specifically, the question is whether the enterprise of rebirthing centered African civilization—in the face of world domination by Eurasians—by means of therapeutically engineering the quickening of the African personality as that construct is excogitated in the works of Daudi Ajani ya Azibo (2014, 2015a; Azibo, Robinson-Kyles, & Johnson, 2013) jibes with selected Szaszian ideas that appear to be in opposition to said enterprise or at least raising red flags. The most persistently troubling Szaszian position, perhaps foundational to all others, is his decrying “the denial of the reality of free will and of the tragic nature of life . . . [leading to] reject[ing] the inevitability of personal responsibility” (Szasz, 1994, p. 35). While not denying enslavement and colonialism, it is as if invoking in the libertarian fashion the magic words “personal responsibility” and “free will” presto chango warrants disavowal of ADP’s special truth about Eurasian civilization’s responsibility in ameliorating continuing negative aftereffects of the Maafa (great enduring disaster of colonialism and enslavement, Baruti, 2005a; Jones, 1992; Roberson, 1995).

Backdrop on African Personality: Its Role in Rebirthing African Civilization

Though thoroughly treated by Historian Chancellor Williams (1993), nescience surrounding the idea of rebirthing African civilization requires first acknowledging that ADP had civilizations, including high cultures. They stretched continent-wide and across Eurasia (Bauval & Thomas, 2011; Ben-Jochannan, 1971, 1987; Carruthers & Karenga, 1986; Diop, 1974; Finch, 1998; Hilliard, 1988; Houston, 1985; Jackson, 1970; James, 1976; Onyewuenyi, 2005; Rashidi, 1992; Van Sertima, 1985a, 1985b; Williams, 1976). As a result of continuous, bitter warfare perpetrated against African civilizations by Eurasian people starting as early as 4,500 BCE and continuing in modern times (Williams, 1976)—which gave pause to Diop’s (1991) posing the preeminent anthropological question: Civilization or barbarism?—ADP worldwide have quite literally regressed under duress from pyramids to (housing) projects. Not only the discrimination but especially the domestication by Eurasian civilization visited on ADP these past five centuries has so devastated (never elevated) the humanity of ADP to the point of necrotizing the African personality globally wheresoever ADP are found (Azibo, 2011a, 2012, 2014). This is not to be glossed over: ADP have been dehumanized through de-Africanization at the hands of domestication by Eurasian civilization. The scope of this is almost unfathomable: Scores of millions of ADP operate in the world bereft of a functioning African personality defined as psychological and behavioral functioning that forefend ADP’s life chances by prioritizing defending, developing, and maintaining African life and culture (Azibo, 2006, 2014, 2015a). For the masses of ADP, it follows that the psychobehavioral benefits of African personality are precluded and its dictates never enter consciousness in any way practicable. For ADP, this would seem a weighty factor accounting for much variance in individual, collective, and national bad behavior and low-level functioning. It seems that African civilizations thrived when the national African personality was intact (Azibo, 1999; Carruthers, 1999) implying intact status among the populace overall.

As the African personality (Azibo, 2015a; Khoapa, 1980; Tembo, 1980) is seen to represent ADP’s characteristic and distinct way of negotiating reality at the psychobehavioral modality level, having cemented before the dawn of reciprocal psychosocial influences between ADP and Eurasian descent people, for recoupment of African humanity—culturally speaking—African personality must be resurrected in individuals of African descent (Azibo, 2014, 2015a, 2015c; Azibo et al., 2013). But, a mandate such as this would be anathema in Szaszian thought. Would not a Szaszian libertarian ask “Do ADP want African personality? If not, then too bad. No mental health or personality theory including African-centered can be imposed. Szasz is clear that that is coercion masquerading as treatment in clients’ best interest. So leave them alone.” However, the question is not fair and the case is not so simply closed. ADP’s reality is such that most do not even know they are devoid of African personality or that it has been externally disfeatured and daunted. Also, many ADP who do know or who may come to know might not only resist but revile at the re-Africanization idea. The paradox could not be more viciously pernicious: In the African populace, African personality is denied and abjured due to external impetus, whereas the domestication by Eurasian civilizations that has resulted overall in a bricolage personality that bounds ADP globally in identity “from nigger-to-negro” (Jennings, 2003, p. 251) as it is designed to satisfy Eurasian necessities to maintain hegemony over ADP—despite it being frequently anti-ADP—is wallowed in as a function of slave and colonial consciousness legacies (Azibo, 2015a, 2015b). In and of itself this de-Africanization with its ramification for permanent cancelling out of African personality qualifies as a crime against humanity (Azibo, 2011a, 2012, 2015c). It simply must be rectified. According to Azibo (2015a) “the social engineering of the African personality [is] something that can and should be done [as only] . . . the African personality construct” (p. 171) can represent rectification, irrespective of individual ADP wanting it or not or being indifferent.

Mental healthwise, there is a concern about ADP who would naysay re-Africanization as captured by African personality:

For a [colonized,] captive and enslaved people which we Blacks [worldwide] are, the highest form of mental instability could be . . . a Black who has adjusted to his [or her] condition and/or has accepted the value system of the White [or Arab] oppressor . . . [she or he] is more in need of the services of the mental health provider than the traditional “patient” . . . Because [his or her] . . . level of adjustment [to Eurasian civilization] . . . is dangerous not only to him or herself and the family related, but also to present and future Black generations. (Ben-Jochannan, cited in E. Alexander, 1980, pp. 34-35)

Boko Harem and hosts of others (Baker, 2008; Council on Black Internal Affairs, 2002) come to mind. This raises an issue about therapist’s mental health gestalt. Viewing client rejection of African personality rebirth as acceptable says doing so is not reflecting a serious “problem in living,” to use Szasz’s most famous phrase, besetting ADP. By inference, then, rejecting African personality rebirth could be a sign of good mental health or adjustment under Eurasian hegemony goes this logic. The psychological worker must choose a side—rebirthing African personality is or is not an appropriate mental health imperative. The choice is part and parcel to the profession: Szasz (2002) points out psychiatrists choose “to be parties to conflict. . . . To be involved in human conflicts and hence cannot avoid choosing sides” (p. 72, italics in original). African personality theory chooses the side of instilling and reinforcing African personality by the therapist. In fact, efforts

must be carried out parent-to-child as did Hamilcar-to-Hannibal, from leaders and executives to their top tier staffers as did Marcus Garvey to his inner circle (Martin, 1986), from mentors to mentees and psychotherapists to their African descent clients. (Azibo, 2015a, p. 170, italics added)

Centered African psychology unabashedly by definition situates itself in the motivation or nia (purpose) to transform and maintain ADP culturally as Africans in perpetuity (Azibo, 1996a; Karenga, 1982). Therapy is directed to this end (Atwell & Azibo, 1991; Azibo, 2014, 2015). In so doing, the long ago call to “set afoot a new man [sic]” (Fanon, 1963, p. 316) is being answered at last (Azibo et al., 2013). This call has been reissued over the years with vigor:

Make another man (Wilson, 1989); I cannot help but make a plea: African Americans must forsake the white man’s [culture] . . . and return, as far as possible, to genuine African values and identity (Bradley, 1992a, pp. 243-244); and We must redesign the Afrikan personality to serve us through these difficult times. (Jones, 1992, p. 109)

Nevertheless, is this position on the slippery slope to psychiatric slavery? Caution is in order so that it does not succumb. Still, I wonder that Szasz might have thought this position is over the slope despite it deriving from ADP’s special truth/experience of racism spewing from Eurasian civilization continuously (Hall, 2015). It is 180° from his adamantine position that a client can and should “prescribe his [sic] own treatment” and has the “right to reject treatment prescribed for him by [the therapist]” and “the right to decide and dictate treatment for himself to be administered by [the therapist]” (Szasz, 2002, p. 7). This contrasts with Azibo’s (2015a) position regarding African personality (note: the terms African personality, racial identity, and psychological Africanity are interchangeable in Azibo’s framework):

[I]t has been argued (a) that societal institutions that socialize mainly determine whether psychological Africanity [African personality] will develop and (b) that under conditions of cultural hegemony where societal institutions reflect Eurasian dictates and sentiments . . . ADP usually develop a psychological misorientation to reality. Thus, it is . . . psychological Americanism, Arabism, or Europeanism that is manifested in the individual’s psyche which, in turn, orients ADP to sustain and develop the alien group even to the detriment of or at the expense of African people. (p. 165)

Indeed, that was and remains the purpose of the perpetrated domestication. It follows that continental and diasporan ADP are “likely in need of a therapeutically-directed psychological Africanity [African personality] development metamorphosis with denouement in correct psychological Africanity [African personality] orientation” (Azibo, 2015a, p. 170).

Adamantly, Azibo (2014) takes this position because

[t]here is a part of human nature that is idiosyncratically organized in individuals and does not involve own-race maintenance dictates [of the African personality]. For ADP, what personality is is the individual’s integration of this non-racial component with the racial African personality construct component. . . . The idiosyncratically organized aspects of human personality [i.e., all constructs and behaviors considered under the heading “personality” like sense of humor, equanimity, Big 5 traits, verbosity, gregariousness, ad infinitum] warrant the label peripheral in juxtaposition to [African personality’s] own-race maintenance aspects. (pp. 43-44, italics in original)

Thus, in Azibo’s (2014) framework two systems of disorders as it were must be taken into account, the culture-focused ones of the African personality and the peripheral ones:

[T]he Azibo Nosology II . . . classifies as peripheral personality disorders any DSM, ICD, or other condition defined in Western psychology that satisfies Wakefield’s [1992] criteria . . . without violating African-centered criteria. These “peripheral” disorders are to be considered alongside—yet secondary to—disorders deleterious to [African personality]. (p. 46)

Therefore, from Azibo’s framework there is no space for clients determining the overall goal of treatment in contrast to Szasz’s position as

[T]he primary goals [are] set for . . . mental health intervention before the client presents in the consulting room and irrespective of his or her presenting problem, which if something else [unrelated to African personality] is automatically relegated to a secondary goal(s) of intervention though it may have to be dealt with first. (Azibo, 2014, p. 42)

Importantly, it is right and desirable to accommodate the Szaszian position for peripheral personality disorders. Thus, on the issue of goal direction and setting, both/and appears to best either/or. The balance to be struck between individual autonomy and public safety referred to above appears achievable in this framework (Azibo, 2015c; see African Law Society discussion). Still, I am doubtful Szasz would have found this acceptable.

Client Maturity and Parens Patriae

Szasz’s position on the client’s control and direction of treatment is predicated on adulthood or maturity status of clients. For Szasz, this is the warranted assumption absent incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. Interestingly enough, the special truth of ADP’s experience reveals them to be not up from slavery and colonialism and still reeling from the relentless one-way warfare Eurasian civilization prosecutes. A significant consequence is that ADP cannot be considered mature in centered African cultural functioning. According to Welsing (1991), the bulk of the African-U.S. have been inferiorized. Fuller (1984) goes farther arguing that African-U.S. are “victims of White supremacy” who resultantly exhibit no adult behavior whatsoever. Their analyses are not colonial, but cogent and can be generalized to ADP globally with good fit. Azibo agrees with them and posits most ADP are neither free nor literate using Harris’s (1992) thought-provoking definitions. The fundamental aspect of freedom for a human being is the ability to conceptualize the world in ways contiguous with one’s ancestors. By militating against this very successfully, Eurasian civilization has made the African-U.S. and most populations of ADP unfree delimiting cogitation to Eurasian-based. Conceptual incarceration of this sort always results in a nonliterate existential state when defining literacy as the application of one’s freedom in negotiating present reality. Therefore, the principle parens patriae (the state, where necessary, stepping in as parent to make decisions for nonadults or otherwise incapable persons)—which is a frequent hammer of psychiatric slavery—seems a propos when applied in the Azibo Nosology II (ANII) framework of African personality breakdown encompassing 55 culture-focused disorders and seamlessly integrated with DSM/ICD diagnosis (Azibo, 2014)—perhaps Azibo’s cynosure (Jamison, 2014). As shown above, that scheme mandates conducting diagnosis and treatment to ultimately restore the African personality. There is a twist here as parens patriae is invoked in service of ADP’s African personality development when the ANII is in play in contrast to the typical case where the state is the United States, another Eurasian nation or an ADP’s nation-state whose mental health system functions under Eurasian psychiatric hegemony and parens patriae frequently serves psychiatric slavery.

Szaszians likely are seeing red flags galore. Caution is in order whenever parens patriae is contemplated as looming is the slippery slope to psychiatric slavery rationalized with paternalistic and “client best interest” claims. Great vigilance may be required not to slide, good intentions notwithstanding (the road to hell is paved with them). Also, with major aspects of treatment mandated, the therapist enters the client relationship with an agenda and resultantly possibly a little too forcefully. Also, this can make guarding against developing “furor therapeuticus” more relevant than usual. Another matter for caution is the therapeutic state in which “treatment is contingent on, and justified by, the diagnosis of the patient’s illness and the physician’s prescription of the proper remedy for it . . . the therapeutic state exercises authority and uses force in the name of health” (Szasz, n.d.-b, para. 2). When therapy is more about social control than social service (Szasz, 1984) and parens patriae is used to support that agenda, then it might be foolish to think it can serve ADP’s return to a free and literate African personality. After all, Eurasian mental health work vis-à-vis ADP has historically been overly criminal and inadequate (Azibo, 1993; Bulhan, 1981, 1993; Citizen’s Commission on Human Rights, 1995; Guthrie, 2004; Nicholas, 1993; Thomas & Sillen, 1972). A cautionary test when working from the ANII is for the therapist to contemplate regularly cui bono? If it is the therapist or the non-African-centered state and not the client then she or he is off track and must backtrack to correct matters.

Is a “Therapeutic State” Inevitable Under the Mandate to Restore African Personality?

About the “state,” there is a bigger twist. All of Szasz’s works were thought out in the context of the current Eurasian world order and its history, naturally. As African personality is conceptualized as the psychological gearing that will motor ADP to rebirth African civilization—with power (Wilson, 1998)—a different world order and therefore a different concept of state is envisioned. It is African Law Society(s) being adumbrated which may take two forms, a nation-state or a Malcolm X Nationalism state type. From African personality perspective, these two state types would be self-determining and nondeferring to Eurasian states. African Law Society implies an attitude of sovereignty in the populace of ADP reflecting “concrete psycho-political mentality of proactive national vision [about which] the Black psychological worker must serve as an inoculator” (Olomenji, 1996, p. 72, italics added). It implies as well ADP standing on and employing centered African frame of reference (Kunjufu, 1972) or the centered African Principle (Thompson, 1997) conceptualizing the world in ways contiguous with the irrefragable worldview of their ancestors. It follows that legal and political theory would be epistemologically based in and ideologically oriented toward centered African interpreted history and culture (Baruti, 2009). The nation-state concept speaks for itself. Malcolm X Nationalism state type means ADP controlling the socio-politico-economics in their communities (Maglangbayan, 1979) whether maroon, internally colonized, or otherwise “nation existing within a Eurasian nation” status (Obadele, 1998; Williams, 1976).

African Law Society under Eurasian domination is not a far-fetched vision. There are historic realizations (Carruthers, 1985; Counter & Evans, 1981). These past 500 years, ADP have always attempted it nobly in every epoch. In colonial America, for instance, liberty pursuing free and enslaved “Africans’ . . . plans for the destiny of colonial North America . . . contemplated a polity led by themselves in league with the indigenous” (Horne, 2014, p. ix; Schama, 2006). African-U.S. have continued striving for African Law Society into modern times (Carmichael & Thelwell, 2003; Obadele, 2003; Shakur, 1969, 1987). For Central and South America, the story is similar (Counter & Evans, 1981; Urrutia, 2015). In Brazil for example, “Quilombos reflected the people’s will and soon the governing and social bodies of Palamares [the most famous quilombo] mirrored Central African political models . . . allow[ing] for continuation of African [state] traditions” (Wikipedia, 2015, Quilombo section). This is the ethical crux mental health establishmentarianism refuses recognition. The reason is its inherent role of supporting the Eurasian world order which spawned it (Azibo, 1993). In contrast, establishment psychiatry resists but recognizes the ethical issues Szasz has raised. Denial that all diasporan ADP in the Americas, including the African-U.S., save modern-day visa- and passport-holding immigrants, are a vanquished, conquered lot of Africans with retained rights to self-determination—prerequisite to which is restoration of African personality—is not progressive. That their ancestors were present in the Americas before Eurasians (Bradley, 1992b; Imhotep, 2012) strengthens ADP’s claim on self-determination’s right to an African Law Society unless the jus ad bellum utamawazo and veni vidi vice utamaroho of Eurasian culture is invoked. Invoking them in the maintenance of Eurasian supremacy should be recognized as unethical even though this thinking and motivation inheres in Eurasian culture. It would appear inescapable that the option of African Law Society for Diasporan ADP is legitimate vision. Rather than providing psychiatric–psychological backup for quotidian Eurasian supremacy which seems unrelenting (Chomsky, 1993) or status quo, the ethical response for psychiatry and mental health is to promote or not oppose ADP’s pursuit of African Law Society.

There are three psychological points to be taken from this African Law Society discussion. First is that likely only the intrepid who maintain(ed) functional African personality struggle(d) for it. Second is that that struggling represents mental health—psychological and behavioral functioning that reflect the African personality dictate of prioritizing “own-race maintenance” (Azibo, 1996b). Third, with ADP in extremis, the African personality based mental health dictate of own-race maintenance and restored African personality apparently the best bet for amelioration, the incumbency on the mental health worker to direct treatment toward African personality restoration trumps objections based on libertarian individualism (persons are responsible for their individual selves) espoused throughout Szasz’s works and the specter of arguably de facto psychiatric slavery. Still, I affirm Szasz’s (2002) position on the client’s “right to refuse treatment” (p. 7) as well as the fact that “treatment of the disease for the benefit of the patient does not justify his coercion” (p. 62). It appears that I contradict myself, but no as from Szasz’s utterances the dilemma is resolvable:

[L]ike Church and State, Psychiatry and the State ought to be separated by a “wall.” . . . The role of psychiatrists and mental health experts with regard to law, the school system, and other organizations ought to be similar to the role of clergymen in those situations. (Szasz, 1998, para. 2)

I take from this and similar utterances by Szasz the conviction that in African Law Society to come such state–mental health apparatus collusions not be permitted. In the event of a person of African descent who is a danger to African Law Society and its populace, removing him or her is the legislative, law enforcement, and penal systems’ responsibility. The offender must not be coerced into treatment, including African personality development. Should she or he opt in as a consenting adult, the mental health worker must not brook state interference in therapy. It is an ethical matter that the therapist not participate in coercion. Simultaneously, it is the African descent worker’s duty, and the Eurasian worker of goodwill, to support African Law Society. As collusion with the state regarding coercion for any reason is seen as actually destructive to the value edifice of African Law Society, it thereby would be an anti-ADP act. By definition, this violates the African personality mental health definition which applies perhaps first of all to the African descent mental health worker.

Political Prisoners and the African Law Society (to Come)

By definition, a political prisoner is a person removed from society at the behest of visible or shadow government for being a threat to the state instead of criminal activity per se. Szasz is critical of psychiatry playing a part in this: “public psychiatry” marketed as “care of severely ill mental patients” employs psychiatric slavery regularly (not disclosed in the marketing) with its “lie that psychiatric imprisonment is hospitalization” thereby “misdescrib[ing]” public psychiatry’s “true aim” which is “social control” (Szasz, 2002, p. 60). African-U.S. people, probably ADP globally, are at great risk of abuse and control subject to public psychiatry. Is it coincidence that diagnosis of severe, prognosis poor mental disorder in African-U.S. youth experienced a statistically significant uptick with corollary increases in drug therapy and placement in jails and receiving homes? That these increases are directly traceable to President Kennedy’s implementing national community mental health programming is a coincidence? About the result there is no question as H. Myers and King (1980) showed that millions were removed from society. Were they “mentally ill” and in receipt of society’s benevolence? Or, was the mental health establishment doing its part in collusion with government to blunt the “Black Power” movement by removing from society the foot soldiers? That is social control all day long. Szasz (2002) would seem foreboding on the general point:

the person erroneously accused of having schizophrenia [and like DSM/ICD “diseases”] and being dangerous [as a result of the diagnosis] cannot be proven healthy or safe. . . . This is what makes deprivation of liberty on psychiatric grounds incompatible with the principles of a free society. (p. 62)

If this be true of society at large, then public psychiatry vis-à-vis the African-U.S. is a palpable threat. It is the danger to individual (traffic stop arrestee) and large gatherings of ADP (protestors in the Michael Brown, Samuel Dubose, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, ad infinitum, terroristic killings) and disaster victims (Hurricane Katrina). As Szasz (2002) pointed out, “[u]nder the guise of combating dangerous diseases, mental health laws attempt to purge society of persons whom psychiatrists label ‘dangerous’” (p. 62). Many states now permit determination of dangerousness by remote forensic assessment.

As Eurasian nations like the United States may be still persecuting ADP in actuality, all of the purged are political prisoners. In disagreement with Szasz, however, they can be proven healthy and not dangerous to self or society if the diagnostic criteria for disorder in conjunction with the African personality normalcy templet contained in the ANII (Azibo, 2014) is used as the main determinant of normalcy. This would dent the social control public psychiatry affords Eurasian society vis-à-vis ADP. Concerning African Law Society, precluding public psychiatry could be a tremendous challenge given (a) the apparent abundance of persons who might constitute “dangerousness” and (b) the mandate to restore African personality. About the latter, the warning not to go over the slippery slope was addressed above. Regarding the former, it is open to all that a “behavioral sink,” not unlike that found in animal studies (Marsden, 1975), may be substantially affecting ADP today. It was evident among the African-U.S. during enslavement (Walker, 1829/1965) and immediately afterward (C. Johnson, 1934). Evident as well in gang and gangster mentalities and ethnic slaughtering like the over one million killed in the Biafra civil war or the Tutsi–Hutu conflict, this behavioral sink is a devolution “that both mirrors and impels the social deconstruction everywhere evident” (Finch, 1998, p. 139)—especially in comparison with African personality construct (Azibo, 2014). Many disorders in the ANII pose palpable threats to African Law Society and they seem to be prevalent in the populace.

The politically elite ADP are important in the realization and stabilization of African Law Society. When they pose a danger to it, as naturally some would, and of these many might be African personality disordered, should African Law Society remove or isolate them through transparent, above board means? Of course, this will likely be warranted at times. This is a political–legal call; not a psychiatric one. Still, treatment even to restore African personality must not be coerced consistent with Szaszian thought. This holds even where an African Law Society legalizes incarceration for mental disorder like most nation-states today. After all, “forcing drugs down a patient’s throat, or injecting them into his buttocks [or imposed therapy otherwise] (Szasz, 2002, p. 63) should be as much an anathema in African Law Society as it is to Szasz. It is ethical to entice the removed with incentives to accept treatment as well it is to maintain their isolation until they complete or otherwise satisfy the African personality development/restoration therapy offered. A repugnancy in psychiatry to be forsworn in African Law Society is “impos[ing] penalties for non-compliance” (Szasz, 2002, p. 63, italics in original). Moreover, removal should be carried out like a

systematic exclusion of individuals from society on medical grounds . . . the exclusion [being] intended to benefit the healthy members of the community [those with healthy African personality], not the patients [African personality disordered]. (Szasz, 2002, p. 65)

The erstwhile standard practice of removing Lepers is an analogy.

African Law Society’s Unwanted

If the restoration mandate and the likelihood of removing citizens from African Law Society is condemnable as “psychiatric removal and segregation of society’s unwanted” (Szasz, 2002, p. 81), so be it. That charge would be fully acceptable, not indicating unethical behavior and undaunting as there are multitudes of ADP shaped into anti-ADP by imposed Eurasian domestication. The resulting alienation or de-Africanization extends to abjuration and active destruction of things African (Azibo, 2011a, 2014)—including nation-states (Azibo, 2012). Indeed, before Boko Harem, the vaunted Ghana, Mali, and Songhai empires were destroyed by Arabicizing in the guise of Islam perpetrated on the leaders followed by the populace (Azibo, 2014; Diop, 1987). De-Africanization of this sort is enduring and qualifies as quintessential dangerousness to self (conceptualized in African personality) and to society (of the African law type). Therefore, disordered citizens not opting in for therapy for African personality restoration court a transparent removal from society when identified—perhaps to prison, an asylum (see Bring Back Asylums? section) or deportation to a Eurasian state. This should not be a psychiatric decision, but a legal–political one.

Bring Back Asylums?

In discussing asylums as they were meant to be originally, the humanism in Szasz is effulgent:

[M]ental patients do not need mental hospitals; they need asylums—places of refuge where they would be protected from coercion by [psychiatrists] . . . a modern system of asylums—not for mental patients [alone], but for anyone who seeks refuge, for whatever reason [provided she or he] . . . eschew lawlessness [in effect] orphanages for unwanted adults. (Szasz, 2002, pp. 132-134)

This infrastructure is recommended for African Law Societies. It seems appropriate that reparations from Eurasian nations be obtained and earmarked in part for an asylum network as Eurasians are culpable in the psychocultural dismantling of ADP including African personality (Azibo, 2011a, 2012, 2015c).

Nosology

Flaws in the DSM-5 have triggered a crisis in psychiatry (Morgan, 2015). Professionals are correctly criticized “for their continued passive acceptance of a very flawed DSM [5]” (Carney, 2014). Establishment psychiatry criticizes professionals just for being critical of the DSM-5 (Frances, 2013). For Szasz (n.d.-a, para. 3)

[t]he problem with [DSM] psychiatric diagnoses is not that they are meaningless, but that they may be, and often are, swung as semantic blackjacks: cracking the subject’s dignity and respectability destroys him just as effectively as cracking his skull. The difference is that the man who wields a blackjack is recognized by everyone as a thug, but one who wields a psychiatric diagnosis is not.

While nosology will be anathema to a percentage of mental health workers always, two points relevant when considering the legitimation of the ANII pandect of African personality disorders (Azibo, 2015b) would follow from Szasz’s position: that psychological diagnoses may not be meaningless and the danger of “thuggishly” utilizing them is not inherently greater or lesser than that of utilizing those from DSM or ICD. Assuming ANII diagnoses are tools that may strengthen the African personality, skilled and ethical therapists are priority one.

Diversity in the Populace

Fear that mandatory restoration of the African personality might depress diversity and individuality is unwarranted. Recalling that Azibo’s (2014) framework consists of idiosyncratically organized peripheral as well as African personality components, diversity is seen to be each person pursuing African personality own-race maintenance dictates in her or his unique way wrapped in the integrity of his or her individuality afforded by the peripheral component. With this definitional scheme, it is undeniable that the sameness in the African personality-based race survival behaviors of Patrice Lumumba and Kwame Nkrumah, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., W. E. B. Dubois and Marcus Garvey, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Mary McLeod Bethune, Sojurner Truth and Harriet Tubman, and so forth, was carried out through their uniquely or diversely configured peripheral component: this is diversity epitomized. Good definitions help set matters straight and Szasz was keenly aware of its importance as he frequently stated in public lectures “in the animal kingdom, the rule is eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.”

Suicide/Own-Life Taking: A Serious Definitional Difference

The ANII accepts Bobby Wright’s (1981, 1985) position. Wright examined the paroxysm of own-life taking among African-U.S. over the 1970s and defined the phenomenon as lynching, to wit “Black suicide: Lynching by any Other Name is Still Lynching.” His definition, perspicacious and perspicuous, was based in operant conditioning logic

that since Eurasians are guilty of directly or indirectly specifying the environment within which ADP live, Eurasians therefore are responsible distally for ADP’s behavior taking place there . . . the conclusion [is] compelling that ADP who attempt or take their own lives are pushed into it by Eurasian civilization and not pulled into it through the exercise of their own agency. (Azibo, 2014, pp. 105-106; also see Azibo, in press)

When viewed this way, this is nasty business. It represents an extreme outcome of social control by Eurasians that ADP must be protected against. Szasz (2002), in contrast, defines suicide as acceptable psychiatrically as “it is absurd to equate dangerousness to self with dangerousness to others. Killing oneself is not a criminal offense. Killing another person is” (p. 32). Szasz takes the position that it ought not to be psychiatry’s purview to protect the person wanting to commit suicide from dangerousness to himself or herself as largely this is a smoke screen for involuntary commitment anyhow.

The great gulf between these positions stems from (a) worldview differences in the definition of self (Eurasian: individualistic, me-myself-I life force containment; centered African: collectivistic, we-us-I life force containment) and (b) the resulting divergences in social theory used by Szasz (libertarianism, extreme individualism) versus used by Wright and Azibo (African-centered communalism, village mentality). There are points that follow. The libertarian value orientation lends itself to potentially nontrivial disconnect between client and therapist, perhaps implicated in Szasz’s statement “As far as I was concerned, things outside the consulting room were not my business” (Wyatt, 2000, Psychotherapy section, para. 27). It also conveniently compels holding Eurasians blameless for or provides rationalization for denying the reality of inferiorization → failed functioning → bad behavior → poor choices including own-life taking that specifying harmfully the environment for ADP at individual and national levels has engendered and maintained across centuries and generations (→ stands for leading to). Contradistinctively, the ontological edifice—interconnection by spiritual essence—underlying the African personality (Azibo, 1996b, 2011b, 2014; Khoapa, 1980) compels protecting ADP from dangerousness to themselves because the self is seen to be a composite of beings interconnected literally, not just in philosophical metaphor, through consubstantiation in essential, vitalizing spirit. The upshot for the therapist is that it is his or her business what goes on out there outside the consulting room as pertains to clients pursuing African personality derived own-race maintenance behavior, that is, engagement of normalcy functioning in the world. Another point of contrast is that in African personality-based cognition Eurasian civilization incurs blame and, logically, debt for repair and recompense (reparations). The libertarian position that individual ADP are alone responsible for how they respond to their existential reality and like everybody else must, metaphorically speaking, pull themselves up by their bootstraps (Szasz did not use this metaphor in the material reviewed, but it is implied wherever he stands on the libertarian idea) is logical in that line of thinking. When nakedly delinked from ADP’s special truth which shows, metaphorically, Eurasians have strewn glass across the floor and stolen the boots, the position is despicable.

This contrasting of African personality’s extended view of self with Szaszian individualism brings home the point that nonaltruistic own-life taking by ADP is seen to be killing of the group or collective actually. Thus, construing the behavior as okay for the person is logically precluded. Szasz often instructed ask the cui bono question when cogitating psychiatric matters. When ADP take their own lives, does that benefit the individual, the family affected, or help in restoring African personality or rebirthing African civilization? Nonaltruistic own-life taking is incompatible with these last two notions of making and setting afoot a new African person to build centered African civilization and, moreover, is trumped by them.

The reason Szaszian thought on suicide does not jibe with African personality perspective is that in overlaying Eurasian worldview definitional perspective on ADP’s behavior a category error (Ryle, 1949) and transubstantive error (African Psychology Institute, 1982) are made. The upshot is a disconnect between the interpretive framework used and the real meaning of the behavior observed—as just shown.

Szasz on Drugs: Danger for African Descent People

About drugs, Szasz has the same position for all humanity, free access:

[U]sing drugs is a fundamental human right, similar to using books or prayer. Hence, it comes down to the question of what does a person want and how can he get what he wants? If he doesn’t know what to take, then he could go to a doctor or pharmacist and ask them. And then he should be able to go and buy it. (Wyatt, 2000, Use Drugs section, para. 2)

As usual, his arguments are progressive and formidable. In Our Right to Drugs (Szasz, 1992), he devotes Chapter 6 to the African-U.S. which I found splanchnic for its seeming irresponsibility and nonchalance, criticisms that non-Szaszians may be quick to read into his position on drugs, rightly or wrongly. The following, for example, is easily open to this criticism:

All drug laws should be repealed. Then, people could decide for themselves what helps them best to relieve their existential ails, assuming they want to do it with a drug: opium or marijuana or cigarettes or Haldol or Valium. After all, the only arbiter of what ails a person “mentally” and what makes him feel or function better, as he defines better, is the patient. (Wyatt, Use Drugs section, para. 4)

Szasz reminds that a “hundred years ago . . . you could go to a drug store, or to Sears Roebuck, and buy all the drugs you wanted—opium, heroin, chloral hydrate” (Wyatt, Slavery section, para. 4).

The reader might imagine the ramifications of such a drug policy for the African-U.S. populace presently in extremis, perhaps in the death throes of full blown behavioral sink. Although self-medication with drugs by many African-U.S. seems apparent, would any commentator conclude it has been helpful for them? Or, would there be lamentation that substance abuse has beset too many? Whether Szasz and libertarians care or not is irrelevant although the callous, cavalier, nasty indifferentism leaps out in the oft espoused notion “let them kill themselves if they want to. They have free will like everybody else.” Better drug policy options than the Szaszian exist (R. Alexander, 1996). The real vexation is their steadfast conviction that people should be left alone to do as they please in their pursuit of happiness even if it hurts them: “People pay for what they value, and value what they pay for” (Wyatt, Liberty section, para. 6), ergo “[i]f people want to take drugs to control the way they think, feel, behave and perceive, by all means they should be free to do so” (Schaler, 2015, para. 7).

In this regard, Szaszians seem too dismissive about two factors that emerge from African personality theory. Unlike most Eurasian personality theories, there is a teleological motivation to be “more better” postulated as inherent in the African personality construct (Azibo, 2011b, 2014). Neither drug abuse from self-medicating to cope with ails from “living while African” in Eurasian-dominated space nor using drugs recreationally are compatible with it. How then is it that “blacks [come to] . . . dominate the drug abuse market” (Szasz, 1992, p. 111) in contradiction to their ancestral racial–cultural personality? Lyrics from an unidentified song by an African-U.S. artist heard on the radio in 2014 provide a clue: “Why do we inhale [marijuana], because we’re in hell already.” Also, in wake of the spate of police killings of African-U.S. in the news today is the following comment on behavior typifying many contemporary African-U.S.: “Like most people I know, Tremaine smoked weed to ease his wounded mind, to sleep, to laugh, to get carefree, to stop him from putting a bullet in his own head” (W. C. Johnson, 2015, para. 62). Neither free will nor individuality are reflected in self-medication like these examples depict, but African personality disorder stemming from an environment specified to push ADP into choosing bad behavior is (Azibo, 2014, in press). Apparently, there is no bottom to Eurasian civilization’s citizen’s denial and rationalization about responsibility for repairing the behavioral sink besetting ADP under their domination: Who animalized ADP in the first place worldwide wheresoever they conquered them and specified their environment by de-Africanizing them displacing their African personality with a nigger-to-negro identity (Jennings, 2003)/American Africanism (Morrison, 1992) bricolage personality—the greatest, albeit the most heinous as well, demonstration of social construction of identity in the history of social science—part and parcel to which is abjuration and disavowal of all things African as well as self-blame for comparatively wretched existential reality, supposedly because of African extraction, as if designed to prevent ever reconciling with ancestral Africanity (Morrow, 2003), coupled with ingraining the thought that things Eurasian represent the acme of human phylesis? Low-level, inferiorized functioning is a direct result even if distally caused. Acknowledging proximal prerogatives as a possibility is something to build on, but does not change this fact one iota. Loosing people so affected, nay domesticated in the world with “rights” protected by statutes does not a level playing field make. Repair of African personality, for sure, and recompense are prerequisites for ADP to operate in the world self-reliantly orienteering in their own best interests steeped in psychocultural maturity. By ignoring or discounting all this, Szaszian libertarian thought finds space to laud Malcolm X’s resisting drug usage (Szasz, 1992) as if his example sprung forth in a vacuum right out of the libertarian American way. The effrontery is hard to swallow.

Second, the Szaszian position assumes a mature adult and that presumption is not safe for ADP reeling and not up from slavery and colonialism. The lauding of the Malcolm X example that African-U.S. could choose not to use drugs by Szasz actually supports my point. As X, profoundly the Black Nationalist-Separatist always despite waning tinge of Arabicism (Maglangbayan, 1979), was Malcolm Little metamorphosized “Negro-to-Black” (terminology from the African personality literature: Azibo, 2014, 2015a; Azibo & Robinson, 2004), implicated plainly is significant development of African personality toward psychocultural maturity—something the African-U.S. lack en masse. To his credit, Szasz (1992) recognized that “making the Negro [sic] self-responsible and self-reliant” (p. 123) would be necessary. Hence, drug policy based on the Szaszian “our right to drugs” position would be at best irresponsible vis-à-vis the African-U.S. populace, perhaps most ADP. Moreover, it would be as devastating as a neutron bomb if implemented prior to self-reliant stature deriving from restored African personality en masse and an act of psychological warfare inducing mentacide (the systematic and deliberate destruction of an individual’s or groups mind with the intent or strong potential of group extirpation/genocide: Azibo, 2014; Baruti, 2005b; Olomenji, 1996) considering the community destruction it would no doubt usher in. It would seem, then, the pun in the section heading is a propos delivered not at all disrespectfully as derision, but as irresistible.

Ethics, in Case I Have Not Been Clear

Szasz came to be known for his ethical positions surrounding psychiatric slavery. Vis-à-vis African personality restoration—a psychopolitical imperative if ADP are to be free and literate like the rest of humanity and not a Eurasian bricolage personality written across a tabula rasa as it were in domestication—these Szaszian positions are secondary concerns much like peripheral personality disorders are. The ethical question writ large for establishment psychiatry and mental health is will it break with the tradition of deliberate and inadvertent contribution to Eurasian civilization’s supremacist control of ADP’s mentality by domestication—evident in everyday praxis since Samuel Cartwright advanced and Benjamin Rush endorsed personality conceptualizations like drapetomania, dysathesia Aethiopica, and so forth (Thomas & Sillen, 1972), up through the DSM-III-R’s unsocialized conduct disorder diagnosis (dysathesia Aethiopica updated) and continuing DSM-based oppression (Abdullah, 2003), including viewing classic and politically correct updated theses of Sambo, scarred, marked with oppression personality as normalcy for ADP and self-actualized fully functioning personality reflecting indifference to or negation of African personality own-race maintenance dictates as acceptable, resulting at best in benignant indifference seen as best practice—and in the name of mental health and the Hippocratic Oath choose to assist with restoration of African personality (Azibo, 2015a)?

Conclusion

The results are mixed as Szaszian concepts appear likely as not to have a role in centered African personality clinical work and perhaps centered African psychology by extension. The utterances of Thomas Szasz, regarded by many as authority, jibed less where African personality restoration was implicated and more where the discussion was germane to idiosyncratic or “peripheral” parts of personality. The iniquities of psychiatric slavery that Szaszian thought exposes were affirmed as to be avoided employing special vigilance concerning mandated African personality restoration. Cultural differences in Eurasian and African-centered worldviews underlay apparent category mistakes and transubstantive errors and appear to explain most infelicities between Szaszian thought and dictates of the African personality. Perhaps Szaszian thinkers might take note of limitations in their positions “about applications of mental health theory to others” (G. Alexander, 2000, para. 17)—ADP in particular. And, scholars of African psychology and African personality, especially those pursuing African personality restoration among the populace, might reacquaint with Szasz, the lion, “the psychiatrist who has done more than anyone else to challenge psychiatry [toward] . . . adherence to the Hippocratic injunction to ‘do no harm’” (Annas, 2007, para. 17).