The Anti-Psychiatry Movement

At many of the recent meetings I have been to on mental health issues, there has been a conflict between someone who has opposed the mental health system for many years and other more recent years.

The first person espouses the ideas of the anti-psychiatry movement, but sometimes I don't know if he realises it, but he comes over as very dogmatic, and deliberately provocative instead of seeking to persuade others to his views. But I don't feel his opponents are very tolerant either. My feeling is that instead of always emphasising the differences we might make more progress by recognising what is common between us, that we all feel the mental health system is oppressive and that psychiatry is a pseudoscience covering up inhumanity and bullshit behind meaningless medical labels.

Having said all that, I do actually support many of his ideas, and as a contribution to at least letting other people know where his ideas are coming from, I wanted to write the current article.

The Anti-Psychiatry movement started in the 1960s, and funny enough many of its leading figures were dissident psychiatrists, like David Cooper, Ronald Laing and Thomas Szasz.

The anti-psychiatry movement believed that the mental health system was not about trying to understand and support people in extremes of distress, confusion and madness, but actually to deny and suppress that experience by techniques of mind-control, particularly drugging and electroshock. To justify this, they created an ideology that madness was a mental illness, backed with a pseudo-science supposedly based on Biology, but in fact drawing wholey spurious conclusions from rather uninspired experiments.

In contrast, the anti-psychiatry movement saw madness as a biosocial response to social circumstances. We live in a society where lying and manipulation, either on a personal or a social level, is a way of life. All kinds of conspiracy and corruption go on, and it is very difficult to choose between true and false information. In such a situation, under the immense pressures of the modern workplace or that process of social torture known as the benefits system, it is very easy to develop bizarre ideas and experience social rejection and invalidation as a result of them, leading to madness and incarcaration.

The anti-psychiatry movement saw madness as a state of immense terror and confusion, but also that breakdown, in a supportive setting, could lead to insights about life and breakthrough into a more integrated human being. To this end people like Ronald Laing, David Cooper and Joe Berke set up therapeutic communities, and many people did manage to resolve some of their conflicts in a positive way in them. Laing and co come in for a lot of shit and some of it is deserved - Laing was very into being a 60s guru and having a jet-setter lifestyle, and both he and Berke lived and worked in very trendy parts of London - Berke still lives in Regents Park Road - very nice. That criticism doesn't apply to the most radical one, David Cooper, who ended his life burnt out and in dire poverty. But let's remember, these people were at least trying to behave with some common decency to their patients while swimming in a sea of fascist shit - it took courage to stand up to the psychiatric establishment and the right wing press.

However there is another side to madness which is not covered simply by talking about social and family conflict - the altered perception of reality known as hallucinations. Perhaps this altered perception is biochemically triggered by intense personal turmoil, but it is not explained in social terms. Many traditions in the world - Tibetan Buddhism, Native American and African traditions, Shamanism etc, use techniques for accessing alternative perceptions of reality. For example, I have recently read a book called "The Way of the Shaman" by Michael Harner, a past president of the American Anthropological Association, where he outlines procedures for going into a Shamanic trance, where you enter 'other worlds' and converse with animal 'spirit guides'.

But to a psychiatrist, these 'hallucinations' would be symptoms of a 'mental illness' - a term implying some kind of biological malfunction. Psychiatrists assume that 'hallucinations' are some kind of biological malfunction for no reason other than that they do not accept that there are things other people sometimes perceive that they cannot, things that are not part of the ordinary everyday world. Ronald Laing once said that mystics and madmen were both in the same ocean, but the mystics were swimming and the madmen were drowning.

People in the anti-psychiatry movement see the mental health system as having the function of suppressing any of the possibilities of breakthrough and insight latent in madness because those breakthroughs produced people who were no longer willing to conform to the social order which had driven them mad in the first place. Most psychiatrists are supporters of that social order and are unwilling to admit that work, the benefits system, poverty and other social pressures drive people mad. They are often cold, emotionally retarded people, and bad at forming relationships with anyone, let alone people in the throes of a psychotic breakdown. Much easier to mutter pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo about 'biochemical imbalances' as an alibi for smashing people's minds with drugs and electroshock.

So where do we go from here? Ronald Laing and all those other pioneers are all dead and the organisation he founded, the Philadelphia Association, no longer suppports people through psychotic states. It is based in Hampstead, and is basically for the well-heeled middle class. So that leaves the Survivor movement. We are the experts on madness and psychotic breakdown - not those fools and charlatans who staff psychiatric hospitals. It is us who should be supporting people through madness - we've been there. We need to develop the practice and theory, and more important the networks and resources to do so. But more importantly, we need to develop a culture of madness - where madness or the possibility of it is recognised as a positive human condition, allowing people to break out of oppressive relationships and heal themselves. In this our bitter enemies will be the Blair government, who have set up an 'expert committee on mental health, dominated by the reactionary charity Sane, and who plan to extend the mind control of psychiatry even further by forceably drugging people even when they're not in hospital.

However realistically I don't think we can ever achieve very much. The reason is that the amount of time and energy needed to support someone through madness is enormous - I've done it and on one occasion it took a whole group of us one of the most intense months of our lives, after which we were totally exhausted. Even if all the psychiatrists, nurses etc in the bins became suddenly magically transformed into decent human beings, there simply isn't a thousandth of the time and energy necessary to support people through madness. The social system we live in is continually pumping out more and more distress and breakdown - this whole idea of the 'user' opposed to all those 'normal' people out there makes me laugh - I often wonder if people who talk so have any idea of the amount of stress in a modern office, or the people quietly going to pieces on all sides. To be honest psychiatry's only answer to this is drugs and ECT, and psychiatrists are only the people with the job of holding the lid on the pressure cooker for politicians and businessmen.

Me personally, this is the last thing I can contribute for a bit - I'm so stressed out surviving on the dole and looking for work that I haven't space for anything else. People involved in mental health campaigning tend to be either professionals or users on full benefits with somewhere secure to live and no pressure from the dole - I often feel no-one gives a shit about my situation, which is pretty dire. But some people have (for example) fed me when I had no money, which I appreciate, and to them I say please understand, I can't cope with any more for the present.

Donnard White

Selected Reading

Novels: (by Dorris Lessing) The Four Gated City, Briefing for a Descent Into Hell, the Golden Notebook

(by Marge Piercy) Woman on the Edge of Time

by (Mary Barnes) Journey through Madness

survivors (Kate Millett) The Loony Bin Trip

(Mary O'Hagan) Stopovers on my way to Mars

(Judi Chamberlin) On Our Own

by (Lucy Johnstone) Users and Abusers of Psychiatry

profess- (Peter Breggin) Toxic Psychiatry

ionals (David Cooper) Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry, The Language of Madness

(Ronald Laing) Sanity, Madness and the Family, The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise

(Joseph Berke) I didn't have to go mad here

(Thomas Szasz) The Myth of Mental Illness

(Erving Goffman) Asylums

(Michel Foucalt) Madness and Civilisation