The Antipsychiatry Movement: Dead, Diminishing, or Developing?

Years after the heyday of the antipsychiatry movement, a broad array of Internet activists, investigative journalists, psychologists, and academic psychiatrists are questioning the validity of psychiatric categories and diagnostic practices and reliance on pharmaceutical interventions. The October Open Forum notes that these critiques may garner increased attention with the publication of DSM-5.

It has been argued recently that the antipsychiatry movement has transmogrified into a patient-based consumer movement. Instead, the author suggests, various activities and ideas that legitimately could be described as antipsychiatry, or, at least, as highly critical of psychiatry, are burgeoning. These activities include the works of intellectual scholars, such as disgruntled psychiatrists, critical social scientists, and humanistic psychologists; the analyses and writings of high-profile and prominent investigative journalists; blogs, Web sites, and social media that communicate a disdain for psychiatry among citizen Internet activists; and the ongoing, well-documented critique of followers of Scientology. The author concludes that a renewed yet amorphous critique of psychiatry is emerging, even though the tarnished name of antipsychiatry is studiously avoided by all. This critique may intensify, given the likely media and public interest surrounding the upcoming release of DSM-5.