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I've come to believe that a thing called "anti-psychiatry" does not exist, or that the name is a misnomer 99% of the time. Psychiatry is usually formulated as the "healing of the soul/psyche" or as a means of dealing with surplus populations categorized as deviant, mad, sick
In that sense, the vast majority of "anti-psychiatry" projects were just alternative or critical forms of psychiatry. Especially the 1960s/70s milieus in Europe. Later psych patient self-organization (of which I am a part) is predicated on first being categorized as mad or sick
"Anti-psychiatry" currents have offered alternative ways of thinking distress, have problematized deviancy and illustrated how it is policed in surplus populations, but these are all still arguments that are predicated on psychiatric concepts and use variations of psy treatment
Some aim to abolish the gap between the mad and the normal, but in most cases this involves the idea that the "healing of the psyche" be extended to the entirety of the population or a differentiation according to need. Either way we arrive again at taxonomy and a treatment model
The worst alternative thinker of all, Szasz, aimed to erase the arbitrary policing of "madness" by arguing that mad people are only "responsible to the law." They have "problems of living:" abolition of psychiatry as the entrenching of familial norms and the police power (ew).
Anti-psy is often used to express contempt for psychiatric policing, its reductionist thinking, clinical justifications for racism and misogyny, and dismissal of real pain and experience. Its useful for cracking medical hegemony, but it's a mistake to see it as a unified current.
Both R.D. Laing and his psychedelic family work and Frantz Fanon and ideas of psychological healing through anti-colonial violence are called "anti-psychiatric." Putting aside that neither truly are (they both called themselves as psychiatrists), they differ in the extreme.
My own view is that, in our current world/constrained by our manners of thinking, we are trapped in a struggle with and against hegemonic modes of healing. Real healing develops within the struggle against present conditions. Declaring ourselves actually "outside" is dangerous
Those who did try to make an "outside society", like Laing at Kingsley Hall, resembled isolated hippy communes. I harbor no contempt for these kinds of experiments, but there's no real path to open conflict with a distressing world, so the "anti" isn't doing much work.
