pracownik Akademii Dyplomatycznej MSZ
Maria Morzycka-Markowska
Modern medicine, Volume 24 (2018) Issue 2, 2018, pp. 37 - 81
https://doi.org/10.4467/12311960MN.18.025.10491This paper presents a history of the emergence and development of the antipsychiatry movement in Great Britain in the 1960s. It contains a brief history of the origins and main ideas of anti-psychiatry, its reforming concepts and initiatives that sought to achieve reformed approaches to therapy and its theoretical and practical consequences. The anti-psychiatry is presented here as a revolutionary idea seeking to change the system of care extended to those with mental disorders. The British anti-psychiatry was founded by representatives of the medical science, a group formed around R.D. Laing and David Cooper, and it was supposed to be an opposition against institutionalised, coercive psychiatry and psychiatric diagnosis. Although it remained a part of psychiatry, it was also a phenomenon linked closely to changes ongoing in its era, especially with the emerging counter-culture. Its signifi cance lies in the way it inspired new refl ections on the conceptualisation of mental illness, as well as changes in diagnostic model and therapeutic practice of its time.