About Anti-Psychiatry Central


Psychiatry is very well organized. The American Psychiatric Association has something in the area of 36,000 members. Anti-Psychiatry is not so organized. If we are going to have any lasting effect in our adversarial relation to the monolithic expansive institution of psychiatry, we are going to have to organize, too. Websites such as this one represent an on-going effort to mount an effective resistance to psychiatry.


What's Wrong? Why Resist?


The National Institute of Mental Health has statistics suggesting that one in five people in the USA has a "mental illness". This statistical figure is absolute nonsense. Psychiatry is at the forefront of an effort to medicalize the specifically non-medical. Treating social problems as medical conditions has become a problem in itself. One thing medicalization doesn't do is find effective solutions for those social problems, instead it has created a social problem of its own in the form of run away pseudo-science.


Psychiatric treatment can be very harmful. It, as a rule, violates the "First, do no harm" maxim with regularity and impunity. The drugs being used to manage the most severe of psychiatric diagnostic labels are debilitating, confused with the symptoms of disease they would alleviate, and often impede or suspend recovery.  This excessive use of pharmaceuticals in managing behavior has led to studies that show people in the mental health system with the most severe labels dying 20 - 35 years earlier on average than the general population.


Institutional psychiatry involves legalized abduction, imprisonment, brainwashing, assault, and torture. Psychiatric institutions are psychiatric prisons, not hospitals. People are held prisoner within them. Lives are disrupted, and often the person who has had life so disrupted, is never able to get back on the success track again. Owing to the fact that institutional psychiatry is such a destruction force, we are dedicated to organizing  people in order to protect people threatened with the oppression so pervasive in the psychiatric system from it. 



The Abolition Of Institutional Psychiatry

                                                                                                                                              The goal of anti-psychiatry is no less than the complete abolition of institutional and forced psychiatry. Psychiatrists have too much power, and they use this power against anybody and everybody unfortunate enough to get caught up in the mental health treatment system, actually a social control system. The de-legitimization of psychiatry can only serve the people who have been so victimized, and who have had their rights violated, by this system of social control.


The only acceptable resolution to the power struggle between psychiatrist and patient is the complete ouster of the psychiatrist and the liberation of the patient. To this end, we continue working and mount our fight. Anti-psychiatry is, only so long as psychiatry is, although the reverse is not true. When there is no more psychiatry, anti-psychiatry will have served its purpose. Hopefully, that day is all the more closer due to our efforts to mount an effective resistance to the tyranny, horror, and terror that calls itself psychiatry.