ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the continuities and points of rupture between psychiatric and anti-psychiatric practice. It examines how many of the core principles of social or therapeutic community psychiatrists were shared by anti-psychiatry, but how these principles were extended and distorted sometimes unrecognisably. Through these explorations the chapter traces their trajectory out of the psychiatric hospital and into the world of the counter-culture. The chapter considers two anti-psychiatric communities in the London area: Villa 21, run by David Cooper in a ward at Shenley Hospital in Hertfordshire, and Kingsley Hall, run by the Philadelphia Association in a community centre in Bow, East London. It examines both the similarities and the increasing distance between the anti-psychiatrists and conventional psychiatric practice and the development of their anti-institutional politics. The concept and practice of therapeutic communities had been long established in psychiatric thinking.
