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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anti-psychiatry | 6/13 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-psychiatry | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T09:08:59.919288+00:00 | kb-cron |
New professional approaches were developed as an alternative or reformist complement to psychiatry. The Radical Therapist, a journal begun in 1971 in North Dakota by Michael Glenn, David Bryan, Linda Bryan, Michael Galan and Sara Glenn, challenged the psychotherapy establishment in a number of ways, raising the slogan "Therapy means change, not adjustment." It contained articles that challenged the professional mediator approach, advocating instead revolutionary politics and authentic community making. Social work, humanistic or existentialist therapies, family therapy, counseling and self-help and clinical psychology developed and sometimes opposed psychiatry. The psychoanalytically trained psychiatrist Szasz, although professing fundamental opposition to what he perceives as medicalization and oppressive or excuse-giving "diagnosis" and forced "treatment", was not opposed to other aspects of psychiatry (for example attempts to "cure-heal souls", although he also characterizes this as non-medical). Although generally considered anti-psychiatry by others, he sought to dissociate himself politically from a movement and term associated with the radical left wing. In a 1976 publication "Anti-psychiatry: The paradigm of a plundered mind", which has been described as an overtly political condemnation of a wide sweep of people, Szasz claimed Laing, Cooper and all of anti-psychiatry consisted of "self-declared socialists, communists, anarchists or at least anti-capitalists and collectivists". While saying he shared some of their critique of the psychiatric system, Szasz compared their views on the social causes of distress/deviance to those of anti-capitalist anti-colonialists who claimed that Chilean poverty was due to plundering by American companies, a comment Szasz made not long after a CIA-backed coup had deposed the democratically elected Chilean president and replaced him with Pinochet. Szasz argued instead that distress/deviance is due to the flaws or failures of individuals in their struggles in life. The anti-psychiatry movement was also being driven by individuals with adverse experiences of psychiatric services. This included those who felt they had been harmed by psychiatry or who felt that they could have been helped more by other approaches, including those compulsorily (including via physical force) admitted to psychiatric institutions and subjected to compulsory medication or procedures. During the 1970s, the anti-psychiatry movement was involved in promoting restraint from many practices seen as psychiatric abuses. The gay rights movement continued to challenge the classification of homosexuality as a mental illness and in 1974, in a climate of controversy and activism, the American Psychiatric Association membership (following a unanimous vote by the trustees in 1973) voted (by 58%) to remove it as an illness category from the DSM, replacing it with a category of "sexual orientation disturbance" and then "ego-dystonic homosexuality," which was deleted in 1986, although a wide variety of "paraphilias" remain. The diagnostic label gender identity disorder (GID) was used by the DSM until its reclassification as gender dysphoria in 2013, with the release of the DSM-5. The diagnosis was reclassified to better align it with medical understanding of the condition and to remove the stigma associated with the term disorder. The American Psychiatric Association, publisher of the DSM-5, stated that gender nonconformity is not the same thing as gender dysphoria, and that "gender nonconformity is not in itself a mental disorder. The critical element of gender dysphoria is the presence of clinically significant distress associated with the condition." Some transgender people and researchers support declassification of the condition because they say the diagnosis pathologizes gender variance and reinforces the binary model of gender. Szasz also publicly endorsed the transmisogynist work of Janice Raymond. In a 1979 New York Times book review of Raymond's The Transsexual Empire, Szasz drew connections between his ongoing critique of psychiatric diagnosis and Raymond's feminist critique of trans women. Increased legal and professional protections, and a merging with human rights and disability rights movements, added to anti-psychiatry theory and action. Anti-psychiatry came to challenge a "biomedical" focus of psychiatry (defined to mean genetics, neurochemicals and pharmaceutic drugs). There was also opposition to the increasing links between psychiatry and pharmaceutical companies, which were becoming more powerful and were increasingly claimed to have excessive, unjustified and underhand influence on psychiatric research and practice. There was also opposition to the codification of, and alleged misuse of, psychiatric diagnoses into manuals, in particular the American Psychiatric Association, which publishes the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Anti-psychiatry increasingly challenged alleged psychiatric pessimism and institutionalized alienation regarding those categorized as mentally ill. An emerging consumer/survivor movement often argues for full recovery, empowerment, self-management and even full liberation. Schemes were developed to challenge stigma and discrimination, often based on a social model of disability; to assist or encourage people with mental health issues to engage more fully in work and society (for example through social firms), and to involve service users in the delivery and evaluation of mental health services. However, those actively and openly challenging the fundamental ethics and efficacy of mainstream psychiatric practice remained marginalized within psychiatry, and to a lesser extent within the wider mental health community. Three authors came to personify the movement against psychiatry, and two of these were practicing psychiatrists. The initial and most influential of these was Thomas Szasz who rose to fame with his book The Myth of Mental Illness, although Szasz himself did not identify as an anti-psychiatrist. The well-respected R D Laing wrote a series of best-selling books, including The Divided Self. Intellectual philosopher Michel Foucault challenged the very basis of psychiatric practice and cast it as repressive and controlling. The term "anti-psychiatry" was coined by David Cooper in 1967. In parallel with the theoretical production of the mentioned authors, the Italian physician Giorgio Antonucci questioned the basis themselves of psychiatry through the dismantling of the psychiatric hospitals Osservanza and Luigi Lolli and the liberation—and restitution to life—of the people there secluded.
== Challenges to psychiatry ==