Critical psychiatry: an embarrassing hangover from the 1970s?

Abstract

Critical psychiatry is associated with anti-psychiatry and may therefore seem to be an embarrassing hangover from the 1970s. However, its essential position that functional mental illness should not be reduced to brain disease overlaps with historical debates in psychiatry more than is commonly appreciated. Three examples of non-reductive approaches, like critical psychiatry, in the history of psychiatry are considered.