Anti-Psychiatry

1. Anti-Psychiatry
Presented by:
Dr. S.M. Yasir Arafat
Resident Psychiatry
Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University
April 04, 2017.

2. Article Particulars
Title: Laing & Szasz: Anti-psychiatry, Capitalism,
and Therapy
Journal: Psychoanalytic Review
Volume: 93
Issue: 5
Pages: 781-799
Publication year: 2006

3. Authors Particulars
1. Ron Roberts
2. Theodor Itten
Address
1. Kingston University, UK
2. The Int. R. D. Laing Institute, Switzerland

4. “From each according to his abilities, to each
according to his needs.”

5. Anti-Psychiatry Areas
Medicalization of human distress
The coercive nature of psychiatry
Institutional psychiatry

6. Anti-Psychiatry
Szasz remarked that it was folly to speak of the
abuses of institutional psychiatry
Institutional psychiatry was itself an abuse,
as “harming persons categorized as insane is
its essential function”

7. Anti-Psychiatry
Laing and Cooper
violent nature of orthodox psychiatry
methods of insulin coma
psychosurgery
electric shock treatment
 tranquilizing drugs

8. Anti-Psychiatry
Laing and Szasz’s initial point of agreement
centers on the violent nature of the
institution of psychiatry.

9. Anti-Psychiatry
 For Szasz the violence of modern psychiatry finds its
counterpart in the historical violence of the
Inquisition, sanctioned by the Catholic Church to
wage war on witches and witchcraft, functioning to
maintain the hegemony of the Church through the
social upheavals wrought by feudalism.

10. Anti-Psychiatry
 Szasz described the very idea of mental illness as a
myth.
 Described some of the social processes and
consequences of medicalization
 The difficulties that brought people to seek help from
mental health professionals were to be better
described as “problems of living”—a phrase
originally coined by Szasz, though one with which
Laing would have wholeheartedly concurred.

11. Anti-Psychiatry
Laing’s
The experiences and behaviors regarded as
indicative of mental illness were really
“strategies that a person invents in order to live
in an unlivable situation”.

12. Anti-Psychiatry
Laing-Family
The fundamental conflicts in human life are
between those “who hold power and use it to
oppress others, and those who are oppressed
by power and seek to free themselves of it”
(Szasz).

13. Anti-Psychiatry
From somewhat different starting positions, Laing
and Szasz protested
the illegitimacy of coercive psychiatric power
the medical metaphors that accompany it
quite complementary ways rendered explicit the
processes by which madness is manufactured.

14. Capitalism
Although Laing’s and Szasz’s critiques of
institutional psychiatry arise from an
understanding of the unequal distribution of
power in society, we have seen that they have
quite distinct views on the origins of coercive
power.

15. Capitalism
Marxism
Communist, anticapitalist, collectivist, anti-
American, left-liberal statist, and socialist
“It is true of course, that in traditional, coercive
psychiatry, the anti psychiatrists and I face the
same enemy. So did, in another context, Stalin
and Churchill. The old Arab proverb that ‘the
enemy of my enemy is my friend’ makes good
sense indeed in politics and war. But it makes no
sense at all in intellectual and moral discourse”
(Szasz).

16. Capitalism
Szasz was raised by wealthy parents in prewar
liberal Hungary, Laing in Scotland by parents
of lower middle-class standing.
Szasz initially came to the United States to
escape the threat of fascism and later saw his
country of birth falling into Soviet hands

17. Therapy
Responsibility
Szasz-Individual
Laing- Contextual

18. Therapy
 Laing, work which realized that people experiencing
extremely distressing states of mind could benefit
from having a true place of safety—an asylum—to
reside in.
 Such social and collective forms of engagement, with
people whose distress has furnished them into the raw
materials of the psychiatric industry, would only be
disparaged by Szasz, who appears to abhor any
collective enterprise in the public arena that has not
been opened up to the free market as a “personal
service.”

19. Take Home Message
 The anti-psychiatry movement did raise some valid
criticisms of then contemporary psychiatric practice; in
particular, pointing out the negative effects of
institutional living, criticising stigma and labelling, and
alerting psychiatrists to the potential use of political
change in improving patient care.
 All psychiatrists should retain this healthy scientific
scepticism and be prepared to question their beliefs
about the causes and cures of mental illness.

20. Presenter’s Comments
Available
Recent article
Comprehensive Article on the Ideology

21. References
Is available on request

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25. Acknowledgements
Dr. Md. Hafizur Rahman Chowdhury
Faculty Members

26. Queries????
“The important thing is not to stop questioning.
Curiosity has its own reason for existing”.
Albert Einstein