Anti-Psychiatry and Critiques of Psychological Expertise

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Anti-Psychiatry and Critiques of Psychological
Expertise
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Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
Histoire de la Folie (1961) published
in abridged English translation asMadness and
Civilization (1965)
Moral treatment in the asylum as a form of
social control
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Erving Goffman (1922-1982)
Asylums Essays on the Social Situation of
Patients and other Inmates (1961) total
institutions
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Thomas Szasz (1920-
(1961)
(2002)
(1989)
Helped inspire Mental Health Law project
(1972)to restrict laws committing patients to
asylums to give patients the right to refuse
treatment
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• the notion of mental illness has outlived
  whatever usefulness it might have had and that it
  now functions merely as a convenient myth. As
  such, it is a true heir to religious myths in
  general, and to the belief in witchcraft in
  particular the role of all these belief-systems
  was to act as social tranquilizers, thus
  encouraging the hope that mastery of certain
  specific problems may be achieved by means of
  substitutive (symbolic-magical) operations.
• Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness (1961)

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Labeling theory (1966)
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D.L. Rosenhan (1973)On Being Sane in Insane
Placespublished in Science
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R.D. Laing (1927-1989)
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R.D. Laing

• The Divided Self (1960)Schizophrenia as due to
  ontological insecurity, resulting in a false
  self/true self dichotomy.
• Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964)Schizophreni
  a as product of family dysfunction.
• The Politics of Experience (1967)Schizophrenia
  as journey of self-exploration, which can provide
  wisdom and spiritual knowledge to a mad society.

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• Instead of the mental hospital, a sort of
  reservicing factory for human breakdowns, we need
  a place where people who have traveled further
  and, consequently, may be more lost than
  psychiatrists and other sane people, can find
  their way further into inner space and time, and
  back again.
• Laing, Politics of Experience, p. 127-128.

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Kingsley Hall, East London
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Mary Barnes (1923-2001)
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Mary Barnes PaintingsExhibition at her death,
2001
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Phyllis Chesler
(1972)
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Credo for Psychiatrists, American Psychiatric
Association convention May 1970

• Its not penis envy or inner space or
  maternal urges or natural passivity or
  hormone-caused emotionality that determines our
  lives. Its an uptight, repressive male
  supremists (sic) social structure and set of
  social attitudes that prevents us from seeing
  ourselves as full human beings trying to live out
  our potential. Psychiatry that tries to adjust
  to a bad situation is not a help.
• Association for Women Psychologists (formed in
  1969)

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Homosexuality as Pathology in DSM

• Homosexuality as a perversion in 1952 Diagnostic
  and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM
  1).
• APA meeting (1972) members voted that
  homosexuality was not a pathology
• Removed from DSM II as disorder (1973)
• Ego dystonic homosexuality appeared in DSM III
  (1980)one was in conflict about ones
  homosexuality
• Ego dystonic homosexuality removed as a
  disorderDSM III revised (1987)

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John F. Fulton (1899-1950) Neurophysiologist
Historian of Medicine Yale University
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Egas Moniz and the Leucotomeperformed first
leucotomy, 1935
Received Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1949 for this
work
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Leucotome demonstration of destruction of white
matter
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John F. Fulton on the Function of the Frontal
Lobes ( AMA, 1939)
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Transorbital Lobotomy
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Walter Freeman performing Transorbital Lobotomy
(1949)
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(No Transcript)
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(1962)
(1975)