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Anti-psychiatry is a movement based on the view that psychiatric treatment is often more damaging than helpful to patients, highlighting controversies about psychiatry. Objections may include concerns about the effectiveness and potential harm of treatments such as electroconvulsive treatment or insulin shock therapy.
Beyond concerns about effectiveness, Anti-psychiatry might question the philosophical and ethical underpinnings of psychotherapy and psychoactive medication, seeing them as shaped by social and political concerns rather than the autonomy and integrity of the individual mind. They may believe that "judgements on matters of sanity should be the prerogative of the philosophical mind", and that the mind should not be a medical concern. Some activists reject the psychiatric notion of mental illness.
Anti-psychiatry considers psychiatry a coercive instrument of oppression due to an unequal power relationship between doctor and patient, and a highly subjective diagnostic process. Wrongful involuntary commitment is an important issue in the movement.
The decentralized movement has been active in various forms for two centuries. In the 1960s, there were many challenges to psychoanalysis and mainstream psychiatry, where the very basis of psychiatric practice was characterized as repressive and controlling. Psychiatrists identified with the movement included Thomas Szasz, Timothy Leary, Giorgio Antonucci, R. D. Laing, Franco Basaglia, Theodore Lidz, Silvano Arieti, and David Cooper. Others involved were L. Ron Hubbard, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Erving Goffman. Cooper coined the term "anti-psychiatry" in 1967, and wrote the book Psychiatry and Anti-psychiatry in 1971. Thomas Szasz introduced the definition of mental illness as a myth in the book The Myth of Mental Illness , Giorgio Antonucci introduced the definition of psychiatry as a prejudice in the book I pregiudizi e la conoscenza critica alla psichiatria.