The Antipsychiatry Is a concept introduced in 1967 by the thinker David Cooper (1931-1986). It emerges as an anti-institutional and reformist movement that questions the psychiatry As a discipline, and to the role of the psychiatrist, strongly criticizing its foundations and working methods.
Anti-psychiatry tries to break with the stereotypies related to the concept of mental illness, understanding it as a psychic evil of social origin. He considers that it is through psychiatry that subjective problems and mental evils of social origin have attempted to be solved through the medicalization of the problems of cultural unrest.
Critical anti-psychiatry is that labels are assigned to the mentally ill, depriving them of a total description of their person, generating serious consequences, depriving them of their rights and sentencing them from a non-objective reality.
It is also considered a movement of anti-medicalization. It criticizes the pharmaceutical industry in relation to the opportunism and capitalism inherent in commerce, in relation to the medication proposed as necessary from psychiatry, for the treatment of mental pathologies.
It is shown against the use of medication for such treatments, which produce side effects And to a greater extent one Strong dependence .
Thus, anti-psychiatry questions the foundations and methods of psychiatry, criticizes its treatment and questions about the rights of patients. It proposes a new perspective on mental illness and its treatment, since for this movement the description or assignment of a psychiatric term of a mental illness, it frames the subject and limits it in different aspects of his life.
Brief historical review of Anti-psychiatry
It is in the 60's that anti-psychiatry emerges as an alternative therapeutic option. His main references are the British David Cooper and the psychiatrist Ronald D. Laing (1927-1989), who from a new perspective proposed a humanization of psychiatric institutions, considering the concept of mental illness as a problem of education.
In the 1960s the term of anti-psychiatry was used to refer to a doctrinal current in the area of mental health, which called into question the validity of medicine to solve psychiatric problems and promoted the closure of psychiatric facilities.
However, the earliest history of anti-psychiatry dates back to the eighteenth century, where the hospital function began to be seriously questioned, especially asylums and the role of psychiatrists and mental health physicians.
In the nineteenth century madness was conceived as an alteration in behavior, in the way of acting, feeling and deciding and no longer as a disturbance in judgment. Hospitals were the place where the diagnosis and classification of patients were performed, which were distributed according to the same in different pavilions, being subject to the policies and rules of the place.
It was the doctor of those institutions who had the power to speak about the illness and its truth, who could produce it and submit it to reality in terms of the power it exercised over the patient himself.
In other words, these institutions were a place where, instead of curing the sick, they presented themselves as a means of concealment, which could even enhance their own illness.
From the perspective of the antipsychiatry, these institutions reject the subject instead of acting according to their needs. In addition, this theory emphasizes the family, as a social institution par excellence, referring to it as the cause and basis of mental pathologies.
By assigning to the family responsibility for the suffering of the subject who, from this point of view, has lived in an environment that provokes that pathology, facilitated by their parents.
At that time, the antipsychiatry also criticizes the procedures carried out by asylums in their dealings with the patient. Among them, isolation, the regime of rewards and punishments, exaggerated discipline, compulsory work, and especially the doctor-patient relationship.
They understood that the doctor, alone in his knowledge, was the only one with the power to assess the truth of the disease, being able to produce a submission of the patient, managing his will, dominating it and treating the disease according to his own criteria and benefit.
Once diagnosed as"crazy", the subject lost much of his human condition, his freedom, his rights and became a mental patient who had to undergo the indicated treatment, regardless of whether or not he had the will to do so.
Psychiatry argued that it had the therapeutic tools to treat them, even though these methods of work involved closures, submission, and coercive discipline.
It is at the end of the nineteenth century that, since anti-psychiatry, it has focused on the image of the doctor, in relation to his authority, which is strongly questioned as the truth about the disease, the power it had and the effect That it generated on the patient.
Thus, antipsychiatry proposed as a premise to carry out more humanized therapies that take into account the rights of patients residing in asylums, considering the social factor as the cause of diseases of the mind, being the social space in which it moves The subject that is disturbed and not the subject itself.
Anti-psychiatry is thus far removed from the conventional wisdom of psychiatry, being the central topics of discussion, from the critic to the psychiatric system, to the negation of mental illness, understood as a tool of domination and imposition of stereotypies.
It has treated as a revolutionary movement against psychiatry to transform the relations between doctors and patients, eliminating the notion of mental illness and insanity, attributing the pathogen to society and to the family of the subject who has been labeled crazy .
Main criticisms of anti-psychiatry for psychiatry
For anti-psychiatry, psychiatrists are an invention of science insofar as this doctrine views mental illness as lacking in existence. For this movement, the indisposition of the mind corresponds to normal situations that the subjects develop to defend themselves from a social environment, understanding it as a producer in itself, from a disturbance of stability.
In denying the clinical existence of mental illness, anti-psychiatry strongly criticizes the pharmaceutical industry, suggesting that pharmacological treatments are those that cause damage to the brain and the organism of subjects.
It blames psychiatry for the conditions of hospitals operating as insane asylums. At the same time, the criticism also focuses on the notion that has the same of the subject, leaving it affected by a disease, disqualifying it when treated as crazy, so it is also deprived of all power, knowledge about his illness and All their rights, inherent to every human being.
He repudiates the relation of power of the psychiatrist to his patient, pretending to assign to the subject the right to live his life dominating it, subjecting it and manipulating it around a classification or label that questions its reason or normality. It also goes against his humane treatment with the patient and against his exaggerated criteria at the time of diagnosis.
Anti-psychiatry questions the veracity of psychiatry as a science, since from its perspective, pathologizes the normal variations of human behavior, as well as their thoughts and / or emotions. They try to accomplices psychiatrists who prescribe drugs in the desire to maintain their contract or commission to the pharmaceutical industry.
It inculcates the family as a social institution and the education provided by it, considering it a factor that provokes the subsequent mental alterations of the adult stage of the subject.
In this way, disease is not inherent in the individual, but a manifestation of an anomaly in the system of relationships and bonds that are put into play in the family. The antipsychiatry then places the problem in a network of personal interactions, starting with the family, this being the origin of a disorder in the field of social relations, which causes the cause of the emotional suffering of the subject.
From her perspective and criticism with psychiatry, anti-psychiatry condemns her because she considers that she has used the definition of mental illness to medicalize social problems, not being of origin or medical nature.
Therefore, it questions the diagnoses made by it, through which, by qualifying a subject as mentally ill and imputable to him as an incurable disease, he is obliged to take medication for life, affecting his quality of life. lifetime.
They understand that they rob him of hope and encourage him to settle for a life full of drugs to which he will become dependent. Therefore, he considers that the treatments proposed by psychiatry are destructive and harmful in the short and long term.
Antipsychiatry thus seeks to break with the allocation given to people with diseases of the mind, stripping them of the label conferred by a diagnosis which they consider to be of little purpose.
They liberate the patient and confer on him the power to live and exercise his rights, which had been taken from him at the moment of assigning them the pathological status from which antipsychiatry seeks to strip them.
It proclaims the struggles concerning mental health, against social and political forces, with the aim of defending health and transforming society.
Anti-psychiatry today
Today, psychiatry is the only discipline or medical specialty that has an anti-movement: anti-psychiatry.
Many of its criticisms have been considered exaggerated or disproportionate, but the formulations made by this movement have broken with political-social paradigms prior to its emergence. Anti-psychiatry has been a concrete theoretical and practical experience that has achieved achievements of unquestionable character.
Far from renouncing their proposals, which have shown an important value, we must know how to interpret the rethinking and renewal of their premises, according to each specific circumstance of the present time.
At the same time, focusing on antipsychiatry as something past is analogous to the thought it had about stripping the patient of all his rights, subjecting him to the will of others, resigning himself to living an imposed life and not exercising his own will.
Thus, by leaving behind the proposals of anti-psychiatry, the belief is fostered that nothing can be done with social or cultural unrest, an idea that leads to hopelessness and inhibits the search for the changes necessary to live in a better society.
Currently looking at practices performed in mental health institutions such as the use of Psychotropic drugs , The trade inherent in social works or consumerism, it is not unreasonable to think that anti-psychiatry exposes a number of reasons why the current health system on mental health should be valued.
References
- Books, L. (2011). Anti-Psychiatry: Anti-Psychiatry, Michel Foucault, Involuntary Commitment, Gilles Deleuze. Féliz Guattari. Peter Breggin. General Books.
- David J. Rissmiller, D. a. (June 1, 2006). Evolution of the Antipsychotic Movement Into Mental Health Consumerism. Obtained from Mindfreedom
- Ellerby, M. (1971). On Anti-Psychiatry. Chipmunkapublishing.
- Furnham, A. (May 7, 2015). The Anti-Psychiatry Movement. Obtained from Psychologytoday
- Henry A. Nasrallah, M. (December 10, 2011). The antipsychiatry movement: Who and why. Obtained from Mdedge
- History of Mental Health in the United Kingdom: Anti-Psychiatry, Ernest Jones, Wolfred Bion, Electroconvulsive Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. (2013). University Press Org.
- Kotowicz, Z. (1997). D. Laing and the Paths of Anti-psychiatry. Psychology Press.
- Mark S. Micale, R.P. (1994). Discovering the History of Psychiatry. Oxford University Press.
- D. Laing and Anti-Psychiatry. (1971). Robert Boyers Octagon Books.
- Szasz, T. (2009). Antipsychiatry: Squared Quackery. Syracuse University Press.