Anti-psychiatry

Beginning in the 1960s, a movement called anti-psychiatry claimed that psychiatric patients are not ill but are individuals that are misfits in society, and therefore put into asylums. Adherents of this movement often refer to the myth of mental illness, after Thomas Szasz' controversial book, The Myth of Mental Illness.

Origins of anti-psychiatry

The term 'anti-psychiatry' was first used by David Cooper in 1967. Leading lights of the anti-psychiatry movement included Szasz and R. D. Laing. Other critics of psychiatry often associated with the anti-psychiatry movement include Dr. Peter Breggin and Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, a psychoanalyst who uncovered evidence that Sigmund Freud had suppressed observations of child sexual abuse. Surrealism had, however, opposed psychiatry decades before the term anti-psychiatry was coined.

Cooper was a Marxist, and indeed there has been a great challenge to conventional theories of psychiatry from Western believers in Marxism, but the anti-psychiatry movement is by no means homogenous ideologically, and Szasz approached anti-psychiatry from a civil libertarian perspective and challenged Cooper's Marxist beliefs.

Many of their criticisms derived from the inhumane treatment of mental patients. Electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, has been used to sedate and punish difficult psychiatric patients, rather than for therapeutic purposes. This was particularly common prior to the 1970s, and still happens today. (There has been a resurgence of ECT research and treatment in the past decade, for treatment of a wide range of mental illnesses including severe depression, but many things about ECT are still poorly understood, including exactly how ECT works, and opponents of the practice allege that ECT causes brain damage and has killed several patients on whom it was used, some without their consent.) Observation of the abuses of psychiatry in the Soviet Union also led to questioning of the validity of the practice of psychiatry in the West. (In particular, the diagnosis of political dissidents in the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) with sluggishly progressing schizophrenia, when compared to four different types of schizophrenia recognized in the West, led some to question the existence of schizophrenia.)

During the 1970s the anti-psychiatry movement acquired mainstream respectability, and many of its views became mainstream.

Arguments against anti-psychiatry

The discovery of evidence suggestive of biological and genetic bases for some mental illnesses has eroded support for the anti-psychiatric movement in recent years, and its more extreme views are no longer mainstream.

Anthropological studies have claimed that roughly equivalent percentages of people in a variety of cultures, some very different to modern Western culture, develop a disease recognised by that culture as such, with similar symptoms to schizophrenia, and subsequent medical examination of afflicted individuals show similar physical abnormalities as schizophrenics. (However, the lower rates of diagnosis for the forms of schizophrenia accepted in the West in Western Europe than in the United States of America, to question whether it is possible that in some cases schizophrenia is not deliberately misdiagnosed in the United States as a means of political or philosophical repression. DSM IV-TR also notes that there is "a far higher incidence [of schizophrenia] for second generation African Caribbeans living in the United Kingdom.")

Many people diagnosed with a mental illness or illnesses, and many of those who have family members or close friends who have been diagnosed with mental illness find the views of the anti-psychiatry movement absurd and offensive. One of the more outspoken opponents of anti-psychiatry is Dr. E. Fuller Torrey.

Thomas Szasz points out that one of implications of the argument that mental illness does not exist must be that the insanity defense has to be abolished and to argue that someone who has killed someone under the influence of psychosis should be fully criminally responsible for this actions. This position is regarded as inhumane by many people.

Modern anti-psychiatric views

Some who are active in anti-psychiatry have not gone so far as to challenge the illness of psychiatric patients but merely challenged the practice of involuntary commitment from a legal or civil liberties perspective. Many people argue that even if it is sometimes necessary to detain a few people with extreme mental illnesses behind bars, that society is far too eager to lock up people with minor mental illnesses. The controversial UK policy of "care in the community" was instituted partly in response to thse concerns.

A wide concern is of over-diagnosis. Again, advocates argue that while serious mental illness does exist, currently people are diagnosed as mentally ill, and sometimes detained in mental hospitals, when they are (or their speech or behaviour is) merely different (or said to be different) from the prevailing attitudes of their society.

A few individuals have criticized some state statutes in the United States that provide for involuntary commitment, for being unconstitutional as they violate the First Amendment. They argue that in those cases in which the writing or behaviour of the individual examined by a psychiatrist who will possibly be certified as being in need of treatment forms the basis for the diagnosis, the deprivation of liberty which will result if the individual is so found will actually be a result of his speech or writing, and thus effectively the detention will be a First Amendment violation.

In 1998 Szasz and others staged the Foucault Tribunal on the State of Psychiatry in Berlin (named for the philosopher Michel Foucault). Unsurprisingly, this mock tribunal found psychiatry wanting. Its "verdict" stated, among other things, "We demand the abolition of the 'mental patients laws as a first step toward making psychiatry accountable to society."

An anti-psychatry organization called the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) was founded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology. CCHR has used the considerable financial resources of Scientology to wage several vicious media campaigns against various psychiatrists, psychiatric organizations, and pharmaceutical companies (especially Eli Lilly). However, the tactics and claims made by the organization (publications of CCHR include such booklets as Psychiatrists: The Men Behind Hitler and Psychiatric Rape), as well as its close association with Scientology, have made it a pariah among anti-psychiatry circles. Several prominent figures and organizations in the anti-psychiatry movement have publicly distanced themselves from CCHR.

External links:

Anti-Psychiatry Websites

• PROZACSPOTLIGHT.ORG
• ANTIPSYCHIATRY.ORG

• Discussion of the life of R. D. Laing
• Homepage of Dr. Peter Breggin
• disinfo.com article on the Anti-Psychiatry movement, with links to other resources
• Bio of E. Fuller Torrey
• Critical Psychiatry website article
• http://www.uky.edu/~cperring/PPB2.HTM#Antipsychiatry
• Controversial article "Schizophrenia: a nonexistent disease" by Lawrence Stevens.