Anti psychiatry

A HISTORY OF THE ANTIPSYCHIATRY MOVEMENT, AS EXPLAINED TO AN INTERESTED PSYCHOLOGIST by Philip A. Kumin (2023)

First, let’s talk a little bit about the drug companies’ medical model of behavior and the devastation that does to patients’ lives. Keep in mind that Sigmund Freud had discovered a cure for behavior problems, regardless of whether they were due to alcoholism, drug addiction, or insanity. In this odd sense, the drug companies have never had any business getting involved in behaviorism. The fact that their reason for doing so anyway has had everything to do with gargantuan profits, that is a flimsy excuse for the devastation their products wreck on patients’ lives.

I think it’s universally acknowledged that the two worst sources of stigma against patients are always the news media and the Hollywood movie industries. Unfortunately, it remains to be determined if there has ever been any direct collusion between these three entities in the public discrediting of patients. Certainly that discrediting works to the advantage of pharmaceuticals. It’s very similar to the news media and Hollywood’s agreeing to do the drug companies’ dirty work for them.

The first self-serving myth which the drug companies promoted worldwide was that their pills were critical to the maintenance of patients. If some patients refused to take them willingly, they should be physically restrained and forced to take them. The drug companies sought to promote the belief that it was imperative patients take their meds in order to avoid becoming dangerous.

There was one particular problem with this which the drug companies knew they were going to run into: that the law says it’s illegal for one person to assault/put their hands on another person without that person giving permission, and that is just as much true in mental hospitals as it is any place else. This is where the invaluable discrediting by the news media and Hollywood come in. The drug companies’ thinking was that if with the help of their allies, they could devalue the lives of patients in the public eye, no one would give a damn that patients were being assaulted in institutions in the first place. This explains where the problem of stigma comes from.

The startup of the antipsychiatry movement is looked upon as being the date of publication of the controversial book, The Myth of Mental Illness, in the early or mid 1960’s. This book was written by a now-deceased dissident psychiatrist named Thomas Szasz, and I have an ever-so-vague memory of the publicity surrounding it. The antipsychiatry movement, (the name of which is actually a misnomer,) was started by a conglomeration of dissident mental health professionals and academics. Rather than this being a movement against psychiatry, my guess is that it’s more of a protest against the drug companies’ medical model.

I think it’s helpful to look at the timeframe of developments. The first two psychiatric drugs were discovered in the 1950’s and had been brought to market by the early 1960’s. It was just a couple of years after that that the antipsychiatry movement got underway. In the 1970’s, deinstitutionalization began and some of the patients who were released back into the community and who were politically inclined formed their own faction of antipsychiatry, the psychiatric inmates’ liberation movement.

In all these years, the news media has never been willing to publicize either the antipsychiatry movement or the patients’ contingent of it. They don’t approve of either one. Maybe that’s not such a mystery after all, considering that they’ve been no friend to patients.