antipsychiatry
n. an international movement that emerged in the 1960s under the leadership of British psychiatrist R. D. Laing (1927–1989), South African psychiatrist David Cooper (1931–1986), Italian psychiatrist Franco Basaglia (1924–1980), and U.S. psychiatrist Thomas S. Szasz (1920–2012). Antipsychiatrists contested the scientific and practical validity of psychiatry and radically opposed what they understood as a hospital-centered medical specialty legally empowered to treat and institutionalize individuals with mental disorders. Indeed, many antipsychiatrists argued against the very existence of mental disorders themselves, advancing the notion that they are not illnesses at all but rather alternative ways of behaving that alarm people. They viewed psychiatry as a form of social repression and a means to control deviance, and treatment as a disguised form of punishment. —antipsychiatrist
n.