Anti-psychiatry Research Articles

Societal attitudes towards psychiatric patients, medication, and the antipsychiatric movement within the context of theoretical approaches and inclusion initiatives. Τhe role of mental health professionals

Background: Studies examining the cultural and societal factors that shape perceptions of psychiatric patients and medication are gaining prominence. These studies investigate how cultural beliefs, values, and norms influence attitudes towards mental illness and treatment-seeking behavior, with a focus on addressing cultural barriers to care. Aim: The aim of this study was to provide a comprehensive review of literature on these interconnected topics and to analyze the evolving landscape of attitudes towards mental illness within society. Methods: To comprehensively examine the topic, a rigorous literature review approach was utilized. This involved systematically searching and analyzing a wide range of scholarly articles, reviews, and meta-analyses from high-impact factor journals. The search process involved accessing academic databases and employing search strings to ensure inclusivity and relevance of the gathered literature. This methodological approach allowed for the identification and synthesis of key insights, trends, and findings pertaining to the subject matter, providing a robust foundation for the subsequent analysis and discussion. Results: The results reveal a diverse array of perspectives on psychiatric patients, ranging from stigma and discrimination to advocacy for human rights and empowerment. Furthermore, the analysis highlights the impact of the antipsychiatric movement on shaping societal attitudes towards psychiatric treatment and the broader conceptualization of mental illness. Conclusions: Conclusions drawn from this review underscore the importance of addressing stigma, promoting patient-centered care, and fostering inclusivity within mental health discourse and policy.

Artistic Workshops with Patients of a Psychiatric Day Hospital in France

This article delineates a study conducted within a psychiatric day hospital in France, adhering to the principles of institutional psychotherapy and therapeutic clubs that originated from the anti-psychiatric movement of the 1970s. The study specifically explores two activities within this framework: a music club and a video club. The primary objective of each club was to establish activities involving both the patients and the care staff to dissolve the boundaries between them. Additionally, these activities aimed to engage both patients and care staff in the conceptualization and execution processes, thereby fostering a collaborative approach within the psychiatric care setting.

Mental Health vs Mutual Aid: Competing Visions of Care in Black-authored Films in the 1970s

This article considers two little-noted films from the early 1970s that took up a Black politics of "mental health." Both films intervened into racial-liberalist psychiatric and social scientific discourses of "Black pathologies" by drawing from Black radical and community-organizing models to envision how to care for people in distress outside of dominant psychiatric and psychological discourses and institutions. With shared production and institutional contexts yet differing articulations of what radical forms of care looked like both in practice, in narrative, and in mediation, these two films deepen our understanding of what form a Black disability politics of mental health took in this era. They also expand how disability studies as well as disability media studies frame the connections among anti-psychiatry and mad studies movements, Black radicalism and organizing, and cultural production.

Applying the Attrition Model to the Medical System: A Critique of the Current Resistance by the Naturopathic Profession in Canada to the Dominant Paradigm

The premise and attrition model of resistance proposed by some in the anti-psychiatry movement are relevant to all subspecialties of medicine. Themes of monopolization, capitalization and marginalization harmfully affect the delivery of health care across all domains and minimize systemic and structural contributors to health and disease. Naturopathic medicine offers promise to effectively support individuals and communities in navigating modern obstacles to good health but may, in practice, be ina vertently reinforcing the dominant paradigm. The attrition model offers guidance for a steady, strategic resistance instead.

התפסן בשדה הקטל: הולדת הכתיבה המדוברת בעברית מתוך הספרות האנטי-פסיכאטרית

J. D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951) was twice published in Hebrew translation: first in the limited edition of 1954, and second in 1975, when it became a best-seller that ran to seventeen editions. This article considers the acceptance of Salinger's novel in Israel and argues that the second publication coincided with an ideological change that not only paved the way for the acceptance of the language and content of the American text but immediately thereafter, appropriated both the syntax and rhetoric of the early translation in the literature of the anti-psychiatry movement. This circular acceptance was expedited by the publication in 1973 of I Don’t Give a Damn by Dan Ben Amotz, a novel that marks a turning point in the literary use of spoken Hebrew. Through Salinger's mediation, Ben Amotz was able to shake off the ornate Hebrew style typical of the 1970s, and create a new literary language, which became more prevalent in the 1990s. Ben Amotz who had been exposed to the anti-psychiatry movement during his stay in the United States, and even participated in a film on the subject, was drawn to Salinger's book and ended up writing a local version that launched the Israeli genre of anti-psychiatry literature.

""On Being Sane in Insane Places" … it is a work half done."

""On Being Sane in Insane Places" … it is a work half done."

‘This is the end of the road for science’: The mad doctor in Cold War horror comics

This article concerns the representation of scientists, doctors and other agents of reason in Cold War horror comics. Such figures, we demonstrate, are typically represented as misguided, blind to the dangers of their creations or knowingly malevolent. The manifestation of this trend in the 1950s can be understood as a facet of the larger programme of post-Second World War social criticism found in the genre. When horror comics returned after the revision of the Code in 1971, some aligned with the anti-psychiatry movement. These comics portray scenarios in which the discovery of things man was not meant to know extends beyond weapons of war to the human psyche and where psychology as a discipline serves as a repressive apparatus interested primarily in the preservation of social norms rather than the emotional health of patients.

The new self-advocacy activism in psychiatry: Toward a scientific turn

ABSTRACT The anti-psychiatry movement of the 20th century has notably denounced the role of values and social norms in the shaping of psychiatric categories. Recent activist movements also recognize that psychiatry is value-laden, however, they do not fight for a value-free psychiatry. On the contrary, some activist movements of the 21st century advocate for self-advocacy in sciences of mental health in order to reach a more accurate understanding of psychiatric categories/mental distress. By aiming at such epistemic gain, they depart from the anti-psychiatry movement. Through the analysis of the epistemic and political influence of two of these movements – Neurodiversity and the Mad Studies, we show how this new activism has taken a scientific turn compatible with current philosophical scientific frameworks, while still developing a critical approach on psychiatry.

The Rise, Fall, and Resurgence of Electroconvulsive Therapy.

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is one of the most effective treatments for depression. However, significant stigma from the media and the antipsychiatry movement has biased the public toward ECT, leading to underutilization, particularly among those most in need. This report reviews some of the key historical events in the rise, fall, and resurgence of ECT and how modern ECT knowledge and practice are more refined, including an improved understanding of its mechanisms of action and optimal treatment parameters.

José Manuel Rodríguez Delgado, Walter Freeman, and Psychosurgery: A Study in Contrasts

History has conflated the legacies of José Manuel Rodríguez Delgado and Walter Freeman, midcentury proponents of somatic therapies for neuropsychiatric conditions. Both gained notoriety: Delgado after he appeared on the front page of the New York Times having used his stimoceiver to stop a charging bull in Spain; Freeman as the proponent of lobotomy. Both were the object of critique by the antipsychiatry movement and those who felt that their methods and objectives posed a threat to personal liberty. Using archival sources, we demonstrate that this conflation is a misrepresentation of the historical record and that their methods, objectives, ethics, and philosophical commitments differed widely. Accurate knowledge about historical antecedents is a predicate for ethical analysis and becomes especially relevant information as neuroscience develops circuit-based treatments for conditions such as Parkinson disease, depression, and brain injury. Part of that corrective is to counter the conflation of Delgado’s and Freeman’s life and work. Appreciating their distinctive legacies can help guide neuropsychiatric research done today that might yet haunt future generations.

Reflections of a Public Loony

Reflections of a Public Loony Sandy Jeffs (bio) I have been a public loony for over thirty years. In an act of reclaiming my life from the catastrophe of schizophrenia, sharing my story with audiences empowered me to write my own narrative and to eventually see my life through a lens of hope. This act of hope was important because when I was diagnosed in 1976, hope was the first casualty of what was then considered a virtual death-sentence. The magnitude of such an existential crisis cannot be understated. For those of us who carried this diagnosis, we were condemned to a life of irretrievable madness from which we would never recover. That was the messaging we got from clinicians. But in the 1970s psychiatry was under attack in a world that was in a state of flux. The anti-authoritarian 1960s and 70s were heady times for social activism. The Civil Rights movement was in full swing in the USA while the Feminist and Gay Liberation movements across the world were gathering steam. And the antipsychiatry crusade was making waves in the world’s universities where sociology departments and intellectuals were enthusiastic followers of R.D. Laing, Cooper, Thomas S. Szasz, Erving Goffman, and Michel Foucault. Mad people, too, were emboldened by antipsychiatry which offered a robust critique of psychiatry and madhouses in which they were confined. These were characterised as oppressive, dehumanising institutions that represented all that was bad in a world ruled by capitalism. Schizophrenics were portrayed as victims who needed to be rescued from the clutches of psychopathic psychiatrists while tyrannical madhouses were seen as instruments of oppression. Placards from the mass demonstrations in Paris in 1968 proclaimed: Schizophrenics are the Proletariat! Maverick psychiatrist and the darling of the antipsychiatry movement, R.D. Laing, wrote seminal texts in which he describes schizophrenia as a sane response to an insane world. He offers a positive spin on a diagnosis that had such a negative clinical profile. In The Politics of Experience Laing writes that ‘if the human race survives, future men will … look back on our enlightened epoch as a veritable age of Darkness … they will see what we call ‘schizophrenia’ as one of the forms in which, often through quite ordinary people, the light began to break through the cracks in our all-too-closed minds’.1 He goes on further to say ‘madness need not be all breakdown, it may also be break-through’.2 Schizophrenia, according to Laing, was [End Page 174] more like an awakening, a window into higher consciousness which at the time was what a lot of hippie and counter-culture young folks were searching for, often through the agency of recreational drugs. As a young student at La Trobe University in the 1970s which, ironically, was built on land excised from the large acreage on which three psychiatric institutions were built, including Larundel Psychiatric Hospital, I came across antipsychiatry in my sociology and history studies. Sociology was a forceful, unforgiving opponent of psychiatry, and it was where I was made aware of the infamous Rosenhan experiment that was seminal in the growing chorus against psychiatry. Psychologist by training, David Rosenhan set out to prove that clinicians could not distinguish the mad from the sane and to discredit the ‘pseudo-science’ of psychiatry. He sent students posing as voice-hearers into psychiatric hospitals. On presentation they were admitted into a ward and assessed by psychiatrists. They then acted normally and said they were no longer hearing voices. They weren’t believed and were forced to take medication. When they were finally discharged, all but one of the fake patients left with the diagnosis of ‘schizophrenia in remission’.3 It caused a storm in the academic world and an even bigger storm for psychiatry which had been embarrassed by the revelations that the veracity of psychiatric diagnoses was very shaky if not completely spurious. The case against psychiatry was mounting as was the case against the big stand-alone psychiatric hospitals. It was in the midst of this milieu that I began my career as a ‘psych patient’. Influenced by my studies, and by charismatic lecturers, I took on board the...

Is Democracy Therapeutic? A Deweyan Reading of the Institutions of Antipsychiatry.

This article presents a Deweyan reading of the processes of critique, experimentation, and reform that took hold of a minority of psychiatric institutions in Western Europe during the nineteen-sixties and seventies, under the influence of the so-called Italian and British antipsychiatry movements. Framed within a specific understanding of the sixties, the article examines these complex theoretical and institutional operations against the background of John Dewey's idea of democracy, which it interprets, above all else, as the constant provision of material, intellectual, and human resources for the people to directly transform their environment and themselves in increasingly complex and creative ways. After acknowledging the historical and conceptual discontinuities that exist between these two autonomous bodies of knowledge, the first section presents a summary of Dewey's philosophy. Next the article sheds light on Basaglia's and Laing's antipsychiatric projects by interpreting them as a sustained effort to distinguish between schizophrenia as a first and a second disease, an epistemological search in the midst of which each of them ended up creating new institutions that necessarily embarked their inmates on a radical process of Deweyan growth. The key role of the sixties counterculture is emphasized at this point, and examples from Gorizia's and Trieste's asylums, as well as British community households, are read in terms of Basaglia's and Laing's negative and affirmative dialectics, respectively. Finally, in the last two sections, the article argues that antipsychiatry's analysis of psychotic behavior significantly enlarges Dewey's understanding of the circuit of growth and experience, and that Dewey's ideas of growth and experience provided, in turn, a missing criterion for defining mental health and deriving coherent therapeutic and institutional concretions.

An enactivist reconceptualization of the medical model

ABSTRACT According to the medical model that prevails in the Western world, mental disorder is a form of illness, parallel to bodily illness, which can be diagnosed by a doctor on the basis of symptoms and administered treatments designed to “cure” it. However, it seems clear that how we understand “disorder” is influenced by cultural norms and values. Theorists associated with the so-called anti-psychiatry movement have gone so far as to claim that ‘mental illness’ simply is the accepted term for behaviors and experiences that are problematic or do not fit the cultural norm. In my view, however, this social-constructionist view downplays and obscures the very real difficulties encountered by subjects with mental disorder. I argue that rather than rejecting the medical model altogether, we should revise the model by utilizing insights from the enactivist approach in philosophy of mind. An appeal to the enactivist notions of autonomy, sense-making, and adaptivity, I propose, can help us to (a) account for mental disorder’s normative aspect, so that we can navigate a middle way between the medical model and an anti-psychiatry stance; and (b) understand the way in which the neurobiological, social, and existential dimensions of mental disorder are integrated.

Psychiatry and Its Discontents by Andrew Scull

Reviewed by: Psychiatry and Its Discontents by Andrew Scull Jonathan Sadowsky Andrew Scull. Psychiatry and Its Discontents. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. xiv + 376 pp. Ill. $29.95 (978-0-520-97357-2). This collection of essays on psychiatry and its critics by Andrew Scull contains a chapter on the “culture of complaint” that has surrounded psychiatry. That culture has been embodied most dramatically in the antipsychiatry movement but is also reflected in less strident forms of distrust toward the profession. The volume suggests that Scull is himself part of that culture of complaint. On page 2, after stating [End Page 262] his opposition to “progress narratives” of the history of psychiatry, Scull assures us that he does not deny that any advances have been made. But what are they? The erudition brought to bear is formidable. Not only does Scull read much of what his peers publish, he’s done primary source research on an incredible array of subjects. Scull covers asylums, somatic treatments and psychopharmaceuticals, biological reductionism (not only in clinical psychiatry but in experimental psychology), Freud and psychoanalysis, Adolf Meyer, and antipsychiatry. None come off very well. Biological reductionism is subjected to effective demolition. Psycho-pharmaceuticals are discussed only with reference to their adverse effect and the drug industry’s avaricious hype of them. Talk therapies, often promoted by critics of biological reductionism, get little attention. Scull does kook at Freud, whom he regards as “dead.” If dead, though, Freud haunts the book like a ghost—seen only occasionally, but preternaturally influential, animating both the cover and the title. Scull points out that both defenders and critics seem unable to leave Freud alone—but neither is Scull, it seems. And what of the antireductionist Meyer, who wanted to look at the patient’s biology, psychology and social context? Meyer’s doctrines, Scull says, are “empty.” Antipsychiatry doesn’t fare better. Thomas Szasz’s rejection of the reality of mental illness is rightly dismissed as silly. Like many historians of psychiatry, Scull feels compelled to note Michel Foucault’s empirical weaknesses. Foucault is another figure historians of psychiatry seem to consider dead but summon at frequent seances, if only for the airing of grievances. We could call this a repetition compulsion. All of Scull’s views have some merit. The question is whether there is more to the story. There is, I dare to say, some evidence that some psychiatric treatments relieve suffering, even if they all have flaws. (Most medical treatments have flaws.) Criticism of the pharmaceutical industry is warranted, but do we really want a world without any psychiatric medications? Odds are good that a lot of people reading this right now are on one. We can blame this on psychiatric overreach if we want, but if you are one of those people, and feel a benefit, don’t you want that represented in the historiography? There is also plenty of evidence that psychotherapy works—even including the psychodynamic therapy inspired by that dead Viennese horse we keep flogging. I dislike hagiographic history as much as the next person. But medical historians have a responsibility to give some weight to therapeutic benefits of what we study. If psychiatry really cannot do any good for its patients, then why shouldn’t we follow Szasz in calling for its abolition? If our loved ones lose all their assets in spending binges during manic states, or suffer psychotic breaks, or have suicidal depressions, a psychiatry so bankrupt has nothing to offer them. In this wide-ranging book that touches on so many clinical developments in psychiatry over the past 150 years, I cannot name a treatment Scull approves of. Psychiatry’s failures, abuses, and limitations are legion, and few have done more than Scull to document them. If indeed there have also been some advances, it’s fair to ask what they are. [End Page 263] Jonathan Sadowsky Case Western Reserve University Copyright © 2021 The Johns Hopkins University Press

From the Radical Psychology Movement to STS: A Journey From the 1960s in Multiple Parts

ABSTRACT Activism in the late-1960s through the early 1970s in the radical psychology movement created the foundation for an intellectual critique and political practice that was part of a group of overall radical science movements that would become important components of STS in practice. The radical psychology movement emphasized lay perspectives in science and medicine, public participation in science, alternative care, and citizen-science alliances. The anti-psychiatry movement among professionals complemented this phenomenon. Groups such as Psychologists for a Democratic Society and numerous mental patients' rights groups, publications like The Radical Therapist, radical caucuses in professional organizations, and a burgeoning feminist therapy approach helped create a major challenge to normal science in the mental health sector. Participants in these movements were connected to broader health activism and to radical science efforts. Lessons from these challenges to the status quo were useful in developing critical environmental health and justice movements later on, resulting in civic science and community-based participatory research projects which would become central elements of STS. These traditions also nourished a strong co-existence of scholarship and activism in many arenas of science and medicine.

Psychodynamic therapy in the public sector in Italy: then and now. The opportunity of evidence-based practice in the birthplace of ‘care-in-the-community’

A brief account of the history of psychodynamic therapy in Italy is made, with special reference to the public sector. The peculiarities of the history of psychoanalysis in Italy, and the differences with countries such as the UK, are highlighted. In particular, the delay of the development of a psychoanalytic tradition is seen also as due to the historical influences of fascism, the Catholic Church, and the rigidity of the university system. The effects of the de-institutionalisation and community psychiatry movements, which in Italy were quite important, are highlighted. These movements, especially for their more radically ‘anti-psychiatric’ aspects, together with the resistance of the university system which in Italy was mostly based on biological psychiatry, represented obstacles for the development of a psychotherapeutic culture. Psychoanalysis, in particular, in some quarters was seen as ‘conservative’ because in those years it was perceived as only interested in the intrapsychic sphere and not in the social context. For these reasons, in the 1970s psychoanalytic culture had to struggle simultaneously with two opposite forces, from the right and from the left, so to speak: the rigidity of the university system, on the one hand, and some extreme fringes of the anti-psychiatric movement, on the other.

A history of antipsychiatry in four books

A history of antipsychiatry in four books

Die 1968er-Bewegung – Eine Diskontinuität in der historischen Entwicklung der Homöopathie in Österreich?

This article describes how conceptual resources from the 1968 movement, especiallyfrom the anti-psychiatric movement, can be fruitfully used to shed light on the historyof the homoeopathic project in Austria in the late 20th century. In concreto, the paperfirst presents a case study about an Austrian physician and homoeopath. On the basis ofthis example the process of establishing a modern homoeopathic infrastructure in Austriawill be analyzed in the context of its wider social and cultural environment. In additionto that the paper also introduces the historiographical framework of recent debateson the subject in the general history of medicine. By addressing some similaritiesand the potential mutual transfer of concepts between the anti-psychiatric movement ofthe 1960ies and 1970ies and the homoeopathic movement in general, this paper aims atcontributing to a historically informed debate on the development of homoeopathicprojects in Austria and Europe in the second half of the 20th century.

Biography as Method: Lesbian Feminism, Disability Activism, and Anti-Psychiatry in the Work of Seamoon House

Seamoon House was an activist and writer whose political commitments spanned the lesbian feminist, anti-psychiatry, and disability rights movements in the early 1980s. Although she is not widely known, scattered bits of her correspondence and manuscripts have been preserved at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture at Duke University. Rather than simply recovering House from obscurity, this article centres the life of a minor movement figure as one strategy for following the transit of people and ideas between radical social movements in the late twentieth century.

Biography as Method: Lesbian Feminism, Disability Activism, and Anti-Psychiatry in the Work of Seamoon House

Seamoon House was an activist and writer whose political commitments spanned the lesbian feminist, anti-psychiatry, and disability rights movements in the early 1980s. Although she is not widely known, scattered bits of her correspondence and manuscripts have been preserved at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University. Rather than simply recovering House from obscurity, this article centres the life of a minor movement figure as one strategy for following the transit of people and ideas between radical social movements in the late twentieth century.