… do not think that one has to be sad to be militant, even if the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (…) that possesses revolutionary force

Foucault, Preface to Anti-Oedipus, 1977

It is 1973 when doctors, female inmates and nurses dance around a fire throwing off the straitjackets that had locked women up in the asylum at Via Giulio 22 in Turin since the mid- 19th century. It is a day of celebration because all the horrors experienced in that asylum have come to an end thanks to the Basagliano movement, a movement that spoke out against an oppressive and institutional model of care. Of course, it was not yet known what would become of their bodies that had been watched, analyzed, filled with drugs and subjugated by other containment practices, exhausted by that psychiatric power that still knows how to ghettoize and oppress anyone who does not correspond to an idea of productivity and social conformity in some contexts. There was no telling what would become of their lives and of that building that locked them up, but hopes were high.1 In March 1979 the former asylum abandoned since 1975 was occupied by a group of feminists from Turin, including factory workers, trade unionists and university students, who decided to create a Women’s House under the slogan “Liberation is not a utopia. Woman, shout it out, “I am mine!”” That place became a symbol of the inadequacy of closing an asylum that had then been abandoned without implementing other treatment practices. 2

This history allows us to highlight how the early anti-psychiatric movements developed a critique of oppressive dynamics, sometimes arriving at new laws as in the Italian case, but were lacking with respect to managing and taking care of people, and, at least in part, with respect to creating the conditions for psychiatrized persons to have their voices heard.

An unambiguous definition of antipsychiatry is not easy to find, and perhaps does not even exist. The term denotes the critique of psychiatry understood both as a medical science and as a social institution, as well as the movements that have developed since the 1960s that aspired to a reversal of the system of care predominant in the countries of the Global North up to that time. Analyzing the history of these movements requires remaining in the tension between considering all the figures who were calling for an overthrow of the system and recognizing that, in these early stages, no mass movements emerged that gave direct voice to psychiatrized people. As an illustration of this, consider that in the 1980s the Italian feminist movement criticized the Basaglian deinstitutionalization process, pointing out that without the involvement of psychiatrized people, the power to critique psychiatry would remain in the hands of psychiatrists, preventing a real change in the paradigm of care.3

We can say that antipsychiatry is a movement composed of multiple voices, united by the desire to bring out the epistemological rupture around which the historical and social existence of the mentally ill has been built. The goal is to overthrow the psychiatric discourse on the basis of a social critique, defetishizing the concept of mental illness, which scientistic thought had absolutized. This means wanting to give a voice to the humanity behind the label of the mentally ill. The movement comes in different facets: some argue that mental illness is a healthy response to a sick society; others intertwine criticism of psychiatry with the struggle against segregation and social control.4

In a context where societal protests through labor, student, feminist, anti-colonial struggles flourish worldwide, the common critique is affirmed that: psychiatry is not only a medical practice, but a device of social control. Asylums are denounced as total institutions, spaces of segregation where distress is isolated rather than understood. The medicalization of suffering transforms social conflict into individual pathology, with imposed diagnoses and forced treatment.5 In Western countries, psychiatry is a tool to discipline deviant bodies and behaviors of nonconforming individuals who are labeled as sick and subjected to electroshock, psychotropic drugs and internment.                                             

The anti-psychiatric struggle opposes these coercive practices, denouncing psychiatry as a technology of power and claiming the right to self-determination of psychiatrized persons. The ideas of Foucault, particularly in the works, “History of Madness” (1961) and “Overseeing and Punishing” (1975), have had a crucial impact. Foucault analyzes how psychiatry has helped define and marginalize madness, labeling certain behaviors as pathological and disciplining individuals considered deviant.6

Psychiatric power derives from the physician’s total authority over the patient, who is not a subject but a sick object and is superimposed on his illness, nullifying any other aspect of his person: he is thus reduced to a sick body that needs medical practice to return to normal.

The anti-psychiatric critique is strongly based on Foucault’s analyses of biopower and modern medicine.7 Defining medicine as a normalizing discipline whose task is to regulate the social order, psychiatry is credited with perfectly embodying this task. Through the observation of the individual, psychiatry looks at every aspect of life, regulating what is accepted or not accepted by society. Foucault calls this concept “microphysics of power,” or the power to make itself invisible and condition every aspect of human life by regulating the degrees of acceptability and normality of human experiences. A power that then becomes biopower since the primary source on which it is exercised is the body, a dimension that, through medicine, shapes and creates behavior.

According to Foucault, the human body is thus the place where political power invades the subject to the point of dominating its behavior. However, political power is at the same time determined by economic situations. It is on the basis of the interaction of these that normality is constituted, a state determined by the criteria of economic production that psychiatry and medicine must preserve. Illness is therefore a social factor insofar as it is linked to the labor power capacity of the bodies themselves. We can summarize that for Foucault, psychiatry differentiates normality from insanity through the norms of possibility of participation in the labor sphere.

So, contemporary society is based on the medicalization of life, that is, the idea that health and illness are used to control people. This is done through psychiatry, which imposes a view of normalcy influenced by economics. Hence, the system relies on scientifically based racism, which classifies and discriminates people based on their conformity to certain standards of rationality. Foucault affirms that biopolitics is the way power has turned into biopower, that is, a power that controls every aspect of life and uses racism as a central tool for its own expansion and operation. The use of the word racism should be understood in terms of the discrimination and stigma represented by mental illness for all those who do not conform to the rule of reason.8

For the author, anti-psychiatry is the consideration of psychiatry as social exclusion, which puts into practice rules derived from the economic power that establishes the legitimacy of social conduct.

In England, Foucault’s book History of Madness was appreciated and taken up by a community of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, including Ronald Laing and David Cooper, who developed a highly critical thinking toward traditional psychiatry. This led to the creation of alternative experiences such as the running of Ward 21, which began in 1962 in a London psychiatric hospital, and the founding of the households, drop-in centers outside asylums.9 English anti-psychiatry rejects mainstream science, holding it responsible for a violent practice toward insanity, embedded in a broader repressive ideology exercised by society, the family and other institutions.

David Cooper is the first to talk about “anti-psychiatry” by publishing the text “Psychiatry and antipsychiatry” in 196710 , where he highlights how psychiatric diagnoses can become a social label of invalidation since the bodies of psychiatric people are unexpected in a capitalist system of production. For Cooper, psychiatry is the violent tool used to induce social conformity and a system of oppression that produces madness instead of curing it, and the asylum is a political tool to eliminate inconvenient subjects.11

Laing, on the other hand, develops another perspective: he does not deny psychic suffering, but sees it as a meaningful response to a sick world. In his studies of schizophrenia, he argues that psychiatric treatment, instead of helping, destroys the individual, so he imagines and experiments with therapeutic communities in which both psychiatrists and patients coexist, rejecting all forms of restraint and constraint.12

These different currents of thought outline how movements will be formed that will call in some cases for reforms, in others for the abolition of the system itself. In others they will help the development of alternative treatment programs and influence the anti-psychiatric movements of the last 20 to 30 years, which are very different from those of this first phase.

In Italy, the movement developed around the concept of deinstitutionalization, with a reformist and institutional approach: Franco Basaglia and his collaborators struggled to overcome the asylum, seen as a repressive institution, and to create a mental health system based on community integration. However, in The Brazilian Lectures, Basaglia writes, “I am not an anti-psychiatrist because this is a type of intellectual I reject. I am a psychiatrist who wants to give the patient an alternative response to the one he has been given so far.”13 . Law 180 of 1978, known as the Basaglia law, sanctioned the closure of asylums and the creation of a new system of care that was set on other foundations: “reconsidering the space and time experienced by the sick and giving back to the sick person himself the responsibility for his own gestures and his own care.”

In France, however, the goal is not the abolition of asylums, but their transformation.

Institutional psychotherapy, developed by François Tosquelles and Jean Oury, proposes an internal modification of psychiatric facilities, making them more open and democratic. 14 In parallel, the group founded by Foucault, the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons, also links the struggle against psychiatric institutions to that against the prison system, denouncing both as instruments of social disciplining.15

In the United States, the movement is more radical and decentralized. Thomas Szasz denies the very existence of mental illness and denounces psychiatry as a form of social control. In “The Myth of Mental Illness,” he writes, “Mental illness is a myth. Psychiatrists are not concerned with mental illness and their treatments. In actual practice, they deal with personal, social, and ethical problems in living.“ 16 This reading, although it gave theoretical impetus to U.S. anti- psychiatric thought in the 1960s and 1970s, was formulated instrumentally to deny the accessibility and necessity of treatment and the welfare state. Thomas Szasz was a right-wing libertarian physician who in denying mental illness also denied access to care.

In the 1970s and 1980s, movements of survivors of psychiatry emerged, such as the Mental Patients’ Liberation Front and Survivors of Psychiatry, which totally rejected the psychiatric system and claimed self-determination. While in Italy and France the critique of psychiatry also passes through institutions, in the United States there is a clear rejection: no reformism but abolition.

Meanwhile, decolonial psychiatry also developed from a critique of the role of psychiatry in colonial and postcolonial contexts, highlighting how it was used to justify colonial rule and pathologize resistance. Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist and revolutionary, analyzed the psychological effects of colonization on the Algerian population, showing how colonial violence generates deep trauma, but also how colonial psychiatry considers rebellion a symptom of mental illness. Decolonizing madness then means recognizing the political character of mental suffering and dismantling the structures of oppression that produce it.17

Today, this legacy is taken up by figures like Samah Jabr, a Palestinian psychiatrist who analyzes the Israeli occupation in terms of collective trauma, resistance and mental health. Jabr shows how psychiatry in Palestine is politicized, used to try to break the will to resist, while the resilience of Palestinians is often medicalized and turned into a mental disorder.18

The particular genesis of the anti-psychiatric movement appears to be in strong opposition when compared to that of other movements that originated in the same era, moved by grassroots mobilizations and with the participation of mostly oppressed individuals. The reasons for this type of origin can be traced back to the genesis of the movement and its initiators, people with a position of power and privilege within the psychiatric system. It was thanks to the publications of theoretical psychiatrists and thinkers that the first experiments in a new way of understanding mental illness and its treatment were developed in the 1960s and 1970s. Subsequently, this paradigm began to reverse, leading to psychiatrized people having an increasingly prominent voice. Movements such as Mad and Crip Pride, the Post-Basaglian movement, and Collective Care Communities developed on a continuum and critique of early thinkers and psychiatrists.

We believe that questioning the history of the anti-psychiatric movement and the role of psychiatric people within it is critical to drawing insights for evolution and growth for today’s movements.            

References                  

1 Davide Lasagno, “The Bonfire of Belts. Struggles in asylums in Turin in 1968-1969,” Zapruder 16 (2008)
 2 Our Story,” House of Women Turin, https://casadelledonnetorino.it/la-nostra-storia/
 3 Assunta Signorelli, Women, Psychiatry and Power (Rome: Edizioni delle Donne, 1983)
4 Francesco Codato, What is Antipsychiatry. History of the birth of the movement to criticize psychiatry, 2019
 5 I. Illich, Medical Nemesis. The expropriation of health, Mondadori, Milan, 1976
 6 Mario Colucci, “Hysterics, internees, infamous men: Michel Foucault and resistance to power.
7 Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power. Course at the Collège de France (1973-1974), edited by Jacques Lagrange, translated by M. Bertani and V. Zini (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2004).
8 Michel Foucault, Il faut défendre la société (Paris: Gallimard, 1977)
 9 Andrea Terracciano, “Brief history of British anti-psychiatry,” published March 20, 2018 10 Cooper, Psychiatry and Antipsychiatry (Rome, 1978)
 11 Cooper, The Grammar of Living (Milan 1976)
 12 R. Laig, The Divine Ego, Einaudi, Turin 1969
13 Franco Basaglia, Brazilian Conferences (Turin: Einaudi, 1982)
 14 Tommaso Mozzati, Francesc Tosquelles, psychiatry between words and fingers, The Manifesto, 2023
 15 V. P. Babini, “The Study of the Mind: Moments in a Dialogue between France and Italy,” in France/Italy. The Philosophies of the Nineteenth Century, edited by R. Ragghianti and A. Savorelli (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2007
 16 Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness (Turin: Einaudi, 1977)
17 Frantz Fanon, Decolonizing Madness. Writings on colonial psychiatry, edited by Beneduce
 18 Samah Jabr, Behind the Frontlines. Chronicles of a Palestinian psychiatric psychotherapist under occupation.