ABSTRACT
Although the medico-scientific language underpinning psychiatric theory and practice is both powerful and persuasive, beneath this veneer psychiatry is characterized by turbulence and controversy (Busfield, 1996). Its legitimacy has been contested at a variety of levels regarding the boundaries of madness, categorizations of madness, causes of madness and responses to the mad. Moreover, far from being a phenomenon peculiar to the 1960s and 1970s, critiques of psychiatry are as old as the profession itself. Throughout its existence psychiatry has been subjected to radical challenges and resistance from both within and outside its ranks – a reality which has all too often been ignored or dismissed in social histories of the profession. While specific challenges have surfaced at specific historical moments, dissent and resistance to psychiatric authority has been remarkably consistent. In this sense, as Scull (1981) observes, contemporary crises of legitimacy in mental health theory and practice echo earlier such crises confronted by the psychiatric profession. Challenges to psychiatry can be identified at four key sites: theoretical, technological, institutional and legislative (Miller, 1986). Each of these is explored in turn, although it should be recognized that of greater significance is the manner in which they converge and intersect in mental health practice.
