Anti-psychiatry

Psychiatry labels behaviour, it does not support or understand as mental illness.

The term 'anti-psychiatry' was coined by South African psychiatrist David Cooper (1931-86) in his book 'Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry' (1967). According to Cooper, mental illness was not illness at all, and what psychiatrists classified as 'madness' was a form of self-expression that they deemed unacceptable.

The anti-psychiatry movement had its intellectual roots in the work of an earlier generation of sociologists and psychologists for whom mental illness was not the result of biology or genetic inheritance but a label imposed by society upon individuals who did not adhere to social norms. Cooper, himself a trained psychiatrist, considered traditional psychiatry to be antithetical to human

"Madness...is a movement...toward autonomy. This is [its] real 'danger'..."
---David Cooper, The Language of Madness (1978)

growth and human potential. For Cooper and many others involved in the anti-psychiatry movement during its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, traditional notions of mental illness and their associated treatments, especially shock therapy, were oppressive and unjustifiable. Mental illness was a 'myth', a diagnosis primarily imposed upon individuals whom society considered eccentric or unmanageable. For anti-psychiatrists, even schizophrenia amounted to nothing but society's attempt to restrict the freedom of thought and expression of certain individuals.

Anti-psychiatrists were among the first to argue that homosexuality should not be classified as a mental illness, and were also among the strongest supporters for the 'de-institutionalization' of the mentally ill in the 1980s. Due to their efforts, the lay world is now more sceptical of the claims of psychiatrists and the efficacy of their treatments.

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Source:
"1001 Ideas That Changed the Way We Think"
-- by Robert Arp.

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