ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the anti-psychiatric trajectory out of institutional psychiatry, it simultaneously complicates any simple sense of movement away from psychiatry in general. It examines how, although the anti-psychiatric group vociferously abandoned institutional psychiatry, they attempted to build a practical, social, and theoretical bridge between other parts of the mainstream psychiatric milieu and the counter-culture. The book interrogates the psychiatric reform of the post-war period in Britain and explores the conceptual milieu from which the anti-psychiatrists emerged. It traces the development of therapeutic optimism and the treatment of soldiers with 'battle fatigue' in Britain during the Second World War and the rapid development and expansion of the therapeutic community movement in the new National Health Service's psychiatric facilities. The book concludes that the anti-psychiatrists bridged the gap between psychiatry and the counter-culture.
