Psychiatry's main methods are assessment, medication, conversation or rhetoric and incarceration. To the extent that psychiatry presents these problems as "medical diseases", its methods as "medical treatments", and its clients – especially involuntary – as medically ill patients, it embodies a lie and therefore constitutes a fundamental threat to freedom and dignity. Psychiatry, supported by the state through various Mental Health Acts, has become a modern secular state religion according to Szasz. It is a vastly elaborate social control system, using both brute force and subtle indoctrination, which disguises itself under the claims of being rational, systematic and therefore scientific.
