Anti-psychiatry

Antipsychiatric movement has been known throughout the years but this movement had failed to be recognized as many new evidents coming out pointing toward the new discovery and treatment of mental disorders. It is a form of denial and rejection toward the existence of mental illness and how it has been classified and treated.

Thomas Szasz (1972) argued that illness must follow a physical concept and therefore cannot be applied to psychological disorder without any physical pathology. Now we know that he had made an obvious mistake since many new developments in neuroscience today pointing toward the fact that psychiatric disorders are basically neuro-psychological conditions with identifiable cause and prognosis.

The arguments on DSM are shallow as most criteria are made based on epidemiological, population, evidence-based study. What could be debatable is a condition known as culture-bound syndrome such as possession (rasuk: see my upcoming entry in http:drmohdjamil.blogspot.com) and dissociative disorders. Nonetheless, effort has been made to include some of these conditions under ICD-10 classification which has been accepted world-wide for the classification of medical illnesses.

The argument that psychiatrists can’t really tell the exact cause of psychiatric illnesses and hence nullify the existence of the illness is flawed because of their (a) multi-factorial aetiology and (b) evidence revealed from various functional radio-imaging studies which proved otherwise.

The so called anti-psychiatric movement has become a history and not even existed there anymore in the current version of psychiatric textbook and the recent journal.