ABSTRACT
This chapter considers a number of highly controversial thinkers of the Sixties: Szasz, Goffman, Foucault, Laing, and Phyllis Chesler all made madness and mental illness the central concern of their writing. Their reflections were concerned with more than psychopathology. The chapter focuses on the dominant strand of ex-patient activism during the 1970s and early '80s. Szasz's importance for understanding Cold War madness lies in his function as an essential link between postwar psychiatry, alternative or countercultural therapies, and the neoliberal mental health system that emerged out of the cauldron of the Sixties. In retrospect, Szasz's critique prefigures the transformation of US psychiatry since the 1950s. Radical therapy stood at the intersection of so many postwar developments that it can only be seen as a quintessentially Sixties phenomenon. It presents a case study of the gap that opened up between the self-consciously political understanding of madness in the counterculture and the turn toward medical models in psychiatry.
