Psychiatry and its Critics

Extract

It is ironic but not unexpected that, at a time when psychiatry is moving out of isolation and into closer proximity with other disciplines in general hospitals, the relationship of psychiatry with medicine should be called into question. The anti-medical critique of psychiatry represents one approach within a wider movement which has assumed international proportions and adopts a critical or derogatory stance towards psychiatry's methods, aims and social role; it is anti-medical, anti-therapeutic, anti-institutional, and anti-scientific, either by expressed aim or implicitly through the dogmatic, hortatory, diffuse and inconsistent character of its utterances.