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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Critical Psychiatry Network | 3/4 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_Psychiatry_Network | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T09:09:07.013684+00:00 | kb-cron |
== Efficacy == One comparison study showed 34% of patients of a 'medical model' team were still being treated after two years, compared with only 9% of patients of a team using a 'non-diagnostic' approach (less medication, little diagnosis, individual treatment plans tailored to the person's unique needs). However the study comments that cases may have left the system in the 'non-diagnostic' approach, not because treatment had worked, but because (1) multi-agency involvement meant long-term work may have been continued by a different agency, (2) the starting question of 'Do we think our service can make a positive difference to this young person's life?' rather than 'What is wrong with this young person?' may have led to treatment not being continued, and (3) the attitude of viewing a case as problematic when no improvement has occurred after five sessions may have led to treatment not being continued (rather than the case 'drifting' on in the system).
== Critical Psychiatry and Postpsychiatry == Peter Campbell first used the term 'postpsychiatry' in the anthology Speaking Our Minds, which imagines what would happen in a world after psychiatry. Independently, Patrick Bracken and Philip Thomas coined the word later and used it as the title of a series of articles written for Openmind. This was followed by a key paper in the British Medical Journal and a book of the same name. This culminated with the publication by Bradley Lewis, a psychiatrist based in New York, of Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry: The Birth of Postpsychiatry. According to Bracken, progress in the field of mental health is presented in terms of 'breakthrough drugs', 'wonders of neuroscience', 'the Decade of the Brain' and 'molecular genetics'. These developments suited the interests of a relatively small number of academic psychiatrists, many of whom have interests in the pharmaceutical industry, although so far the promised insights into psychosis and madness were yet to be realized. Some psychiatrists have turned to another form of technology, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, although this does draw attention to the person's relationship with their experiences (such as voices or unusual beliefs), and focuses on helping them to find different ways of coping, it however, it is based on a particular set of assumptions about the nature of the self, the nature of thought, and how reality is constructed. The pros and cons of this have been explored in some detail in a recent publication. Framing mental health problems as 'technical' in nature involves prioritising technology and expertise over values, relationships and meanings, the very things that emerge as important for service users, both in their narratives, and in service user-led research. For many service users these issues are of primary importance. Recent meta-analyses into the effectiveness of antidepressants and cognitive therapy in depression confirm that non-specific, non-technical factors (such as the quality of the therapeutic relationship as seen by the patient, and the placebo effect in medication) are more important than the specific factors. Postpsychiatry tries to move beyond the view that we can only help people through technologies and expertise. Instead, it prioritises values, meanings and relationships and sees progress in terms of engaging creatively with the service user movement, and communities. This is especially important given the considerable evidence that in Britain, Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) communities are particularly poorly served by mental health services. For this reason an important practical aspect of postpsychiatry is the use of community development in order to engage with these communities. The community development project Sharing Voices Bradford is an excellent example of such an approach. There are many commonalities between critical psychiatry and postpsychiatry, but it is probably fair to say that whereas postpsychiatry would broadly endorse most aspects of the work of critical psychiatry, the obverse does not necessarily hold. In identifying the modernist privileging of technical responses to madness and distress as a primary problem, postpsychiatry has looked to postmodernist thought for insights. Its conceptual critique of traditional psychiatry draws on ideas from philosophers such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault and Wittgenstein.
== Anti-psychiatry and Critical Psychiatry ==
The word anti-psychiatry is associated with the South African psychiatrist David Cooper, who used it to refer to the ending of the 'game' the psychiatrist plays with his or her victim (patient). It has been widely used to refer to the writings and activities of a small group of psychiatrists, most notably R.D. Laing, Aaron Esterson, Cooper, and Thomas Szasz (although he rejects the use of the label in relation to his own work, as did Laing and Esterson), and sociologists (Thomas Scheff). Szasz discards even more what he calls the quackery of 'antipsychiatry' than the quackery of psychiatry. Anti-psychiatry can best be understood against the counter-cultural context in which it arose. The decade of the 1960s was a potent mix of student rebellion, anti-establishment sentiment and anti-war (Vietnam) demonstrations. It saw the rise to prominence of feminism and the American civil rights movement and the Northern Ireland civil rights movement. Across the world, formerly colonised peoples were throwing off the shackles of colonialism. Some of these themes emerged in the Dialectics of Liberation, a conference organized by Laing and others in the Round House in London in 1968.