Antipsychiatry Movement

The antipsychiatry movement is lacking a clear definition, and the name itself was not totally accepted by its supporters. Nonetheless, one could say that it is characterized by its diversity, both theoretical and geographic. The effort to offer a synthetic, global image risks reducing this important dimension. Developed in Great Britain, it spread to several European countries, including Italy, and also had proponents in the United States. The movement was built up around forceful personalities from the psychiatric profession, who elaborated an important critique both of the ideas at the heart both of theories of the mind [Page 117]and of associated practices. Its exponents have drawn on contributions from outside the profession, in particular from philosophy, and social criticism, the latter deriving in part from the context of the political and social confrontations of the 1960s. Their philosophical inspiration is based as much on existentialism as on phenomenology, Marxism, and certain libertarian currents.

The physicians D. Cooper, R. Laing, F. Basaglia, and J. Foudraine have by and large challenged the validity, even the necessity, of existing institutions for treatment of psychiatric disorders. They fault these institutions for their violence against patients, for example, through the use of electroshock treatments. They also blame them for being the more-or-less voluntary instruments of social repression, in which the sick person is the exemplary victim. Psychiatrists of the antipsychiatry movement react against the excesses of the old hereditary determinism and the nosography that had become a finality rather than a stage in the understanding of the patient's suffering. The various exponents of the movement have not limited their criticism to the notions and concepts at the heart of psychiatric reasoning; they have been equally active in the sphere of praxis. Kingsley Hall in Great Britain, Trieste with the Italian Basaglia, and the Bonneuil Center in France represent some of the efforts to create real alternatives to the psychiatric hospital and have quickly become sites of pilgrimage for caregivers and intellectuals, who have placed a great deal of hope in the realization of these alternatives.

But the critical spirit of antipsychiatry practitioners and the hope that it raised have not been widely diffused. The antipsychiatry movement has remained a collection of individuals rather than a true school of treatment. Its probable legacy is, then, difficult to assess. On the one hand, the radical nature of its critique has engendered lively resistance. Without necessarily associating antipsychiatry with the left-leaning political and intellectual movements of the 1960s and 1970s, it must be stated that the psychiatric community has, on the whole, not been favorably disposed toward antipsychiatry. It has interpreted the antipsychiatry project as a denial of mental illness, which is a considerable exaggeration. On the other hand, antipsychiatry has renewed the critique of a medical discipline that, by the admission of its own representatives, cannot meet its own costs. Nonetheless, such criticisms have necessarily been generated from a common base: the utility and necessity of a science of the human psyche that produces facts and norms. The most fruitful lesson of antipsychiatry is doubtless to have reminded us that psychiatric knowledge is a tributary in the link between the production of medical facts and social norms. From this perspective, the Italian law on mental health inspired by Basaglia and passed in 1978 bears witness to the way in which a society can renew its relationship with exclusion and alterity. This is what antipsychiatry, however awkwardly but sincerely, wished to point out.

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