This, along with protests from the
anti-psychiatry movement, led to a sharp decrease in the treatment.
Anti-Psychiatry (Cooper, 1967), Post Psychiatry (Bracken & Thomas, 2007; Lewis, 2006) and Critical Psychiatry (Ingleby, 2004; Double, 2006) are, after all, still psychiatry (1).
CONTROVERSIAL Scottish medic RD Laing (David Tennant) conducts an
anti-psychiatry experiment at Kingsley Hall in London, transforming the building into a medication-free sanctuary where patients and carers live under the same roof.
CONTROVERSIAL Scottish medic RD Laing (David Tennant) conducts an
anti-psychiatry experiment at Kingsley Hall, in London, transforming the building into a medication-free sanctuary where patients and carers live under the same roof.
Psychiatry and
Anti-Psychiatry. London: Tavistock Publications.
One of these rebels was called
anti-psychiatry because its representatives perceived the basic psychiatric practices developed by Kraepelin as repressive and dehumanizing.
Dubbed the "high priest of
anti-psychiatry", Laing's efforts to redefine the treatment of mental illness were anti-asylum.
Taking a middle ground between the extremes of
anti-psychiatry and Whiggish apologists, Murat's text outlines how both psychiatrists and their patients were deeply implicated in the dramatic political events of their age.
Aho considers the question "Is existentialism
anti-psychiatry?" and carefully shows that "existential therapists need to guard against the tendency to romanticize anxiety," while he nevertheless maintains that "psychic suffering do[es] not originate in faulty biochemistry," but rather from "the structural frailty and insecurity of the human condition itself."
There are two issues in particular that Szasz would want to have clarified for those interested in his ideas: one, his theories never could be whittled down accurately to his being "
anti-psychiatry." Szasz's views are eminently consistent: psychiatry and other helping professions, invalidly based though they may be, should be available for purchase in a flee society, even if they should not be required for general subsidization under health insurance packages.