Fatal Freedom: The Ethics and Politics of Suicide, Paperback

Fatal Freedom is an eloquent defense of every individual's right to choose F a voluntary death. By maintaining statutes that determine that voluntary death is not legal, Thomas Szasz believes that 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.

Society's penchant for defining behavior it terms objectionable as a dis-ease has created a psychiatric establishment that exerts far too much influ-ence over how and when we choose to die. In a compelling argument that clearly and intelligently addresses one of the most significant ethical issues of our time, Szasz compares suicide to other practices that historically began as sins, became crimes, and now arc seen as mental illnesses.

Thomas Szasz was professor emeritus of psychiatry at the State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse. The author of more than six hun-dred articles and twenty-four books, he is widely recognized as the leading critic of various coercive forms employed by the psychiatric medical establishment. His books include Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry; The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement; and Our Right to Drugs: The Case for a Free Market.