Article ID: CBB001202132

“My Place Was Set At The Terrible Feast”: The Meanings of the “Anti-Psychiatry” Movement and Responses in the United States, 1970s--1990s (2014)

unapi

Murray, Heather Michelle (Author)


Journal of American Culture
Volume: 37
Pages: 37--51


Publication Date: 2014
Edition Details: Special Edition: Mental Health and Illness in American Culture
Language: English

The anti-psychiatry movement was a group of ex-psychiatric patients, as well as intellectuals and writers, who organized to advocate for more humane treatment of the mentally ill and to question the very concept of madness and the social control inherent in the psychiatric system. Gaining momentum during the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, thinkers and writers of the movement suggested that doctors had been too keen to medicalize eccentric behaviour, inhibiting both individuality and unconventional thinking. As such, they were particularly critical of biological psychiatry, especially psychosurgeries, shock treatments, and psychotropic drugs (Shorter, History of Psychiatry 313; Rissmiller and Rissmiller 863). At the same moment that the therapeutic impulse was becoming more diffuse in American society, in the form of alternative therapeutic practices and settings such as consciousness raising, leftist radical therapy, therapeutic communities, experimental wards, feminist clinical practices and therapy, as well as self-help, anti-psychiatry offered a radical assessment of psychiatry broadly conceived as inherently repressive, belittling, and spirit-crushing (Herman 255). [from Introduction]

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Article Rubin, Lawrence C. (2014) Introduction: Mental Health and Illness in American Culture. Journal of American Culture (p. 1). unapi

Citation URI
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Authors & Contributors
Thifault, Marie-Claude
Peschier, Diana
Guillemain, Hervé
Scrimgeour, David
Gollo, Francesca
Cahalan, Susannah
Concepts
Mental disorders and diseases
Patients
Psychiatric hospitals
Psychiatry
Therapeutic practice; therapy; treatment
Medicine and culture
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, late
20th century, early
20th century
21st century
18th century
Places
England
United States
Italy
Great Britain
San Francisco (California)
Georgia (U.S.)
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