Anti-psychiatry is a term used to refer to a configuration of groups and theoretical constructs that emerged in the 1960s hostile to most of the fundamental assumptions and practices of psychiatry. Its igniting influences were Michel Foucault, R. D. Laing, Thomas Szasz and, in Italy, Franco Basaglia. The term was first used by the psychiatrist David Cooper in 1967. Some now prefer the term critical psychiatry to avoid connotations that may appear oppositional merely, though the two concepts are distinct.

Two central contentions of the anti-psychiatry movement are that:

1. The specific definitions of, or criteria for, hundreds of current psychiatric diagnoses or disorders are vague and arbitrary, leaving too much room for opinions and interpretations to meet basic scientific standards.
2. Prevailing psychiatric treatments are ultimately far more damaging than helpful to patients.

Other key criticisms of mainstream psychiatry include:

1. Inappropriate and overuse of medical concepts and tools to understand the mind and society, including the miscategorization of normal reactions to extreme situations as psychiatric disorders;
2. Scientifically and/or clinically ill-founded system of categorical diagnoses (e.g., Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM), which stigmatizes patients;
3. Inappropriate (i.e. unvalidated) exclusion of other approaches to mental distress/disorder;
4. Unexamined abuse or misuse of power over patients who are too often treated against their will;
5. Relation of power between patients and psychiatrists, as well as the institutional environment, is too often experienced by patients as demeaning and controlling;
6. Compromise to medical and ethical integrity because of financial and professional links with pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies in countries where these companies are a force.

Some mental health professionals and academics profess anti-psychiatry views, as do a number of former and current users of psychiatric services. Some critics focus their attention on what is known as biological psychiatry. Proponents of some allegedly anti-psychiatric views seek to distance themselves from the term, both for its pejorative associations, and because they regard their theories and methods as evidence-based but not yet accepted by the mainstream psychiatric community.

Quotes regarding Anti-psychiatry

Sourced

• Death’s annihilation is no longer anything because it was already everything, because life itself was only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and bells. The head that will become a skull is already empty. Madness is the déja-vu of death.
  • Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault

• But when the madman laughs, he already laughs with the laugh of death; the lunatic, anticipating the macabre, has disarmed it.
  • Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault

• The elements are now reversed. It is no longer the end of time and of the world which will show retrospectively that men were mad not to have been prepared for them; it is the tide of madness, its secret invasion, that shows that the world is near its final catastrophe; it is man’s insanity that invokes and makes necessary the world’s end.
  • Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault

• At the opposite pole to this nature of shadows, madness fascinates because it is knowledge. It is knowledge, first, because all these absurd figures are in reality elements of a difficult, hermetic, esoteric learning.
  • Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault

• If folly leads each man into a blindness where he is lost, the madman, on the contrary, reminds each man of his truth; in a comedy where each man deceives the other and dupes himself, the madman is comedy to the second degree: the deception of deception; he utters, in his simpleton's language which makes no show of reason, the words of reason that release, in the comic, the comedy: he speaks love to lovers, the truth of life to the young, the middling reality of things to the proud, to the insolent, and the liars.
  • Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault

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Fri Jun 12 20:35:00 2009