From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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
Guatarri, and others criticized the power and role of psychiatry in society, including the use of "
total institutions," "
labeling" and
stigmatizing.
See
