"Over the years, I have had the privilege of working with many great men and women in the field of human rights. I have always admired those who refuse to turn a blind eye to injustice and intolerance. Often, wrongs that need righting have been widely talked about and complained about for years, or even decades, before some individual stands up to say, “Things don’t have to be this way.”

One such individual is Dr. Thomas Szasz – one of the world’s most authoritative critics of a sector of modern society teeming with horror stories and human rights abuses, yet which, in some circles, has managed to maintain a pretense of scientific objectivity.

The field is psychiatry. In the words of Dr. Szasz, “Psychiatry is probably the most destructive force that has affected the American society within the last fifty years.”

It is very well worth examining some of the evidence that would lead to such a conclusion.

The reference to “American society” is only reflective of the audience Dr. Szasz was addressing at the time. His words are just as true for our society, and those of many, many other countries. In the last issue of Freedom we exposed the full story of Leilani Muir who, along with thousands of other Canadians, was sterilized by psychiatrists acting on precisely the same philosophy that gave the world the Holocaust – the racial hygiene of eugenics.

In this issue we take another look at psychiatry. If you believe you have no personal experience upon which to judge the truth or falsity of Dr. Szasz’s assertion, consider this: an estimated $400 million of your tax dollars were siphoned off into psychiatric hands in the last decade in just one aspect of psychiatric fraud – the abuse of medical insurance. We cover this and related matters in detail in this issue.