ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses initially on the original anti-psychiatry movement, beginning with Szasz and Laing, but then move on to consider later critiques that have followed on from what we might call the pioneers. Thomas Szasz was a practicing psychiatrist who became increasingly disillusioned with the dominant approach to mental health problems which viewed them as illnesses of the mind. Szasz preferred to see the mental health problems he encountered in his work as “problems in living”, rather than indicators of an underlying, biologically based illness. Szasz presented a major challenge to conventional psychiatry by arguing that the mind cannot be ill in anything other than a metaphorical sense. Although the term “anti-psychiatry” is so closely associated with Laing, he actually rejected the term himself, and there are other, later theorists who could be characterized as “anti-psychiatry,” in the sense of wanting to reject a biomedical model of mental health problems.
