Critics and dissenters: Reflections on “anti-psychiatry” in the United States

During the 1970s various professionals and social activists adopted an explicitly anti-psychiatry position which was perceived by many as a new phenomenon. Hostility to psychiatry actually predates the establishment of psychiatry as a profession in 1844, and organized opposition to psychiatric practices appeared in the late nineteenth century. The deinstitutionalization of the 1970s, which was aided by development within psychiatry, had a strong anti-psychiatry component, but the novel aspect was the organization of ex-mental patients themselves. By the 1980s the decline of psychiatric power, dissension among ex-patients, and new social trends vitiated the anti-psychiatry movement.