Anti-psychiatry, sometimes spelled antipsychiatry without the hyphen, is a movement based on the view that psychiatric treatment is often more damaging than helpful to patients, highlighting controversies about psychiatry. Objections include the reliability of psychiatric diagnosis, the questionable effectiveness and harm associated with psychiatric medications, the failure of psychiatry to demonstrate any disease treatment mechanism for psychiatric medication effects, and legal concerns about equal human rights and civil freedom being nullified by the presence of diagnosis. Historical critiques of psychiatry came to light after focus on the extreme harms associated with electroconvulsive therapy or insulin shock therapy. The term "anti-psychiatry" is in dispute and often used to dismiss all critics of psychiatry, many of whom agree that a specialized role of helper for people in emotional distress may at times be appropriate, and allow for individual choice around treatment decisions.
Vienna's Narrenturm—German for "fools' tower"—was one of the earliest buildings specifically designed as a "madhouse". It was built in 1784.
Internee being restrained in a bathtub
Internee in a restraint chair at the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum, 1869
Graveyard attached to the Church of St. Thomas in West Yorkshire, England, where thousands of internees from Storthes Hall Hospital are buried in unmarked graves
Ronald David Laing, usually cited as R. D. Laing, was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote extensively on mental illness—in particular, psychosis and schizophrenia. Laing's views on the causes and treatment of psychopathological phenomena were influenced by his study of existential philosophy and ran counter to the chemical and electroshock methods that had become psychiatric orthodoxy. Laing took the expressed feelings of the individual patient or client as valid descriptions of personal experience rather than simply as symptoms of mental illness. Though associated in the public mind with the anti-psychiatry movement, he rejected the label. Laing regarded schizophrenia as the normal psychological adjustment to a dysfunctional social context, although later in life he revised his views.
Laing in 1983, perusing The Ashley Book of Knots (1944)