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' book of that name.

Origins of anti-psychiatry

The term 'anti-psychiatry' was first used by David Cooper in 1967. (However, surrealism had opposed psychiatry decades before this term was coined.) 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. Anti-psychiatry was also popular, on ideological grounds, amongst Western believers in Marxism.

Many of their criticisms derived from the inhumane treatment of mental patients. Prior to the 1970s, it was not uncommon for electroconvulsive therapy to be used to sedate and punish difficult psychiatric patients, rather than for theraputic purposes. 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 indicate 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 major mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, and subsequent medical examination of afflicted individuals have shown similar physical abnormalities.

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.

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 of their criticisms have been acknowledged by psychiatrists in recent years, resulting in a more humane approach to the treatment of mental patients. However, as Thomas Szasz points out, 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.

In 1998 Szasz and others staged the Foucault Tribunal on the State of Psychiatry in Berlin (named for the philosopher Michel Foucault). Unurprisingly, 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.

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