Thomas Szasz Memorial Seminar with Jeffrey Schaler, Morton Schatzman and Anthony Stadlen, Sunday 3 March 2013, Durrants Hotel, London

Abstract

SYNOPSISIn March 2013 I attended a seminar that was a ‘memorial seminar’ for Thomas Szasz, one of the luminaries of the movement against the medicalisation of ‘problems in living’ commonly perceived as ‘mental illnesses’. in this article I review the seminar with a summary of what the three co-facilitators, Jeffrey Schaler, Morton Schatzman and Anthony Stadlen, said about themselves and their intellectual positions; the conversations these positions in relation to Szasz's own provoked in the seminar's participants; and the recent developments of strong challenges to the dominant biomedical model by even such mainstream bodies as the Division of Clinical Psychology of the British Psychological Society.