Anti-psychiatry  

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Enjoy Your Symptom!, 1992 , Slavoj Žižek

Anti-psychiatry refers to a collection of movements that challenge the fundamental theories and practices of (mainstream) psychiatry. Common criticisms include: that psychiatry applies medical concepts and tools inappropriately to the mind and society; that it too often treats patients against their will; that it inappropriately excludes other approaches to mental distress/disorder; that its medical and ethical integrity is compromised by financial and professional links with pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies; that it uses a system of categorical diagnoses (e.g., Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) that they claim stigmatizes patients and to be ill-founded scientifically or clinically; and that the psychiatric system is experienced by too many of its patients as demeaning and controlling.

1960s

Coming to the fore in the 1960s, "anti-psychiatry" (a term first used by David Cooper in 1967) defined a movement that vocally challenged the fundamental claims and practices of mainstream psychiatry. Psychiatrists R.D. Laing, Theodore Lidz, Silvano Arieti and others argued that schizophrenia could be understood as an injury to the inner self inflicted by psychologically invasive "schizophrenogenic" parents, or as a healthy attempt to cope with a sick society. Psychiatrist Thomas Szasz argues that "mental illness" is an inherently incoherent combination of a medical and a psychological concept, but popular because it legitimizes the use of psychiatric force to control and limit deviance from societal norms. Adherents of this view referred to "the myth of mental illness" after Szasz's controversial book of that name. (Even though the movement originally described as anti-psychiatry became associated with the general counter-culture movement of the 1960s, Szasz, Lidz and Arieti never became involved in that movement.) Michel Foucault, Erving Goffman, Deleuze and Guattari , and others criticized the power and role of psychiatry in society, including the use of "total institutions," "labeling" and stigmatizing.

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