5.6 KiB
| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anti-psychiatry | 4/13 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-psychiatry | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T09:08:59.919288+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== 1930s === In the 1930s several controversial medical practices were introduced and framed as "treatments" for mental disorders, including inducing seizures (by electroshock, insulin or other drugs) or psychosurgery (lobotomy). In the US, beginning in 1939 through 1951, over 50,000 lobotomy operations were performed in mental hospitals, a procedure ultimately seen as inhumane. Holocaust historians argued that the medicalization of social programs and systematic euthanasia of people in German mental institutions in the 1930s provided the institutional, procedural, and doctrinal origins of the mass murder of the 1940s. The Nazi programs were called Action T4 and Action 14f13. The Nuremberg Trials convicted a number of psychiatrists who held key positions in Nazi regimes. As one Swiss psychiatrist stated: "A not so easy question to be answered is whether it should be allowed to destroy lives objectively 'unworthy of living' without the expressed request of its bearers. (...) Even in incurable mentally ill ones suffering seriously from hallucinations and melancholic depressions and not being able to act, to a medical colleague I would ascript the right and in serious cases the duty to shorten—often for many years—the suffering" (Bleuler, Eugen, 1936: "Die naturwissenschaftliche Grundlage der Ethik". Schweizer Archiv Neurologie und Psychiatrie, Band 38, Nr.2, S. 206).
=== 1940s and 1950s === The post-World War II decades saw an enormous growth in psychiatry; many Americans were persuaded that psychiatry and psychology, particularly psychoanalysis, were a key to happiness. Meanwhile, most hospitalized mental patients received at best decent custodial care, and at worst, abuse and neglect. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has been identified as an influence on later anti-psychiatry theory in the UK, and as being the first, in the 1940s and 1950s, to professionally challenge psychoanalysis to reexamine its concepts and to appreciate psychosis as understandable. Other influences on Lacan included poetry and the surrealist movement, including the poetic power of patients' experiences. Critics disputed this and questioned how his descriptions linked to his practical work. The names that came to be associated with the anti-psychiatry movement knew of Lacan and acknowledged his contribution even if they did not entirely agree.
The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm is said to have articulated, in the 1950s, the secular humanistic concern of the coming anti-psychiatry movement. In The Sane Society (1955), Fromm wrote "An unhealthy society is one which creates mutual hostility [and] distrust, which transforms man into an instrument of use and exploitation for others, which deprives him of a sense of self, except inasmuch as he submits to others or becomes an automaton"..."Yet many psychiatrists and psychologists refuse to entertain the idea that society as a whole may be lacking in sanity. They hold that the problem of mental health in a society is only that of the number of 'unadjusted' individuals, and not of a possible unadjustment of the culture itself". In the 1950s new psychiatric drugs, notably the antipsychotic chlorpromazine, slowly came into use. Although often accepted as an advance in some ways, there was opposition, partly due to serious adverse effects such as tardive dyskinesia, and partly due their "chemical straitjacket" effect and their alleged use to control and intimidate patients. Patients often opposed psychiatry and refused or stopped taking the drugs when not subject to psychiatric control. There was also increasing opposition to the large-scale use of psychiatric hospitals and institutions, and attempts were made to develop services in the community.
According to the Encyclopedia of Theory and Practice in Psychotherapy and Counseling, "In the 1950s in the United States, a right-wing anti-mental health movement opposed psychiatry, seeing it as liberal, left-wing, subversive and anti-American or pro-Communist. There were widespread fears that it threatened individual rights and undermined moral responsibility. An early skirmish was over the Alaska Mental Health Bill, where the right wing protestors were joined by the emerging Scientology movement." The field of psychology sometimes came into opposition with psychiatry. Behaviorists argued that mental disorder was a matter of learning not medicine; for example, Hans Eysenck argued that psychiatry "really has no role to play". The developing field of clinical psychology in particular came into close contact with psychiatry, often in opposition to its methods, theories and territories.
=== 1960s === Coming to the fore in the 1960s, "anti-psychiatry" (a term first used by David Cooper in 1967) defined a movement that vocally challenged the fundamental claims and practices of mainstream psychiatry. While most of its elements had precedents in earlier decades and centuries, in the 1960s it took on a national and international character, with access to the mass media and incorporating a wide mixture of grassroots activist organizations and prestigious professional bodies. Cooper was a South African psychiatrist working in Britain. A trained Marxist revolutionary, he argued that the political context of psychiatry and its patients had to be highlighted and radically challenged, and warned that the fog of individualized therapeutic language could take away people's ability to see and challenge the bigger social picture. He spoke of having a goal of "non-psychiatry" as well as anti-psychiatry.