Happy birthday, my friend

Today my friend Tom turns eighty-eight. For a variety of reasons, I have seldom contacted him lately, but I did not want to miss out the chance to express publicly my respect, my admiration and my personal gratitude to him. Tom is probably not only the world´s most important expert in psychiatry, psychoanalysis and personal and social behaviour, but also the person who has had the most significant impact on worldwide generations of social researchers, politicians, physicians, and scholars worried about the increasing medicalization of society and the progressive loss of our basic liberties on the medical-political Establishment´s hands. However, forgive me if I do not devote this space to praising his public figure right now. Check out any of the two-million Google search references with his name, or, better still, visit his website, The Thomas S. Szasz Cybercenter for Liberty and Responsibility, if you want to know about his intellectual stature, his dozens of books, and hundreds of articles and speeches. Read his texts. You will realize that, the number of his works being almost immeasurable, what makes a difference is what he says, rather than how many times he says it. I am not going to talk about his magnum opus either. There are many studies, articles and reviews on The Myth of Mental Illness (New York: Paul B. Hoeber, 1961) and the importance of this paramount work in the medical, social, political, and philosophical fields. What I really want to do is to talk very briefly about the Tom I had the pleasure to meet some years ago. Actually, I ‘met’ him before actually meeting him, when I read for the first time Our Right to Drugs: The Case for a Free Market (New York: Praeger, 1992), and became fascinated by the logical strength of his arguments. Then The Myth of Mental Illness, The Meaning of Mind (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), and many other of his books contributed to change the way I had thought about personal freedom issues for good. Since I started reading him and, later on, communicating with him, I have never come accross a single book, article, letter or piece of text that has not left me thinking, reflecting, and later wondering how on earth someone could possibly write such a number of masterworks. In 2001, I had the honor of translating into Spanish his book Fatal Freedom: The Ethics and Politics of Suicide (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999), and a year later I visited him in his hometown in upstate New York. I will never forget how nicely and kindly he greeted and showed us around the amazing national park surrounding Syracuse, his brilliant reasoning in our conversations, and the peaceful atmosphere of his beautiful house in the middle of a forest in the town of Manlius. I have never meet anyone with such intelligence and mental strength, and, at the same time, equally high principles, decency, kindness, and sense of humour.

Dear Tom, I hope you have had the best of birthdays, full with the love of your family, and surrounded by the Spring colors of the amazingly beautiful trees of your place. We do not forget you in this side of the Atlantic.

All the best,

Photo: Thomas S. Szasz, Syracuse, New York, 2002 © www.szasz.com