on the seemingly rational ground that nothing falls outside the province of health and medicine, just as the theological state had swallowed up everything human on the perfectly rational ground that nothing falls outside the province of God and religion". Faced with the problem of "madness", Western individualism proved to be ill-prepared to defend the rights of the individual: modern man has no more right to be a madman than medieval man had a right to be a heretic because if once people agree that they have identified the one true God, or Good, it brings about that they have to guard members and nonmembers of the group from the temptation to worship false gods or goods. A secularization of God and the medicalization of good resulted in the post-Enlightenment version of this view: once people agree that they have identified the one true reason, it brings about that they have to guard against the temptation to worship unreason—that is, madness. Civil libertarians warn that the marriage of the State with psychiatry could have catastrophic consequences for civilization. In the same vein as the separation of church and state, Szasz believes that a solid wall must exist between psychiatry and the State. "Total institution" In his book Asylums, Erving Goffman coined the term 'total institution' for mental hospitals and similar places which took over and confined a person's whole life. Goffman placed psychiatric hospitals in the same category as concentration camps, prisons, military organizations, orphanages, and monasteries. In Asylums Goffman describes how the institutionalisation process socialises people into the role of a good patient, someone 'dull, harmless and inconspicuous'; it in turn reinforces notions of chronicity in severe mental illness. Law In the US, critics of psychiatry contend that the intersection of the law and psychiatry create extra-legal entities. For example, the insanity defense, leading to detainment in a psychiatric institution versus a prison, can be worse than criminal imprisonment according to some critics, as it involves the risk of compulsory medication with neuroleptics or the use of electroshock treatment.. While a criminal imprisonment has a predetermined and known time of duration, patients are typically committed to psychiatric hospitals for indefinite durations, an arguably outrageous imposition of fundamental uncertainty. It has been argued that such uncertainty risks aggravating mental instability, and that it substantially encourages a lapse into hopelessness and acceptance that precludes recovery. Involuntary hospitalization Critics see the use