http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-psychiatry
The gay rights movement continued to challenge the classification of homosexuality as a mental illness and in 1974, in a climate of controversy and activism, the American Psychiatric Association membership (following a unanimous vote by the trustees in 1973) voted by a small majority (58%) to remove it as an illness category from the DSM, replacing it with a category of "sexual orientation disturbance" and then "ego-dystonic homosexuality," which was deleted in 1987, although "gender identity disorder" and a wide variety of "paraphilias" remain. It has been noted that gay activists at the time adopted many of Szasz's arguments against the psychiatric system, but also that Szasz had written in 1965 that: "I believe it is very likely that homosexuality is, indeed, a disease in the second sense [expression of psychosexual immaturity] and perhaps sometimes even in the stricter sense [a condition somewhat similar to ordinary organic maladies perhaps caused by genetic error or endocrine imbalance. Nevertheless,
if we believe that by categorising homosexuality as a disease we have succeeded in removing it from the realm of moral judgement, we are in error. ][31]
One remarkable example of psychiatric diagnosis being used to reinforce cultural bias and oppress dissidence is the diagnosis of drapetomania. In the USA prior to the American Civil War, physicians such as Samuel A. Cartwright diagnosed some slaves with drapetomania, a mental illness in which the slave possessed an irrational desire for freedom and a tendency to try to escape.[38] By classifying such a dissident mental trait as abnormal and a disease, psychiatry promoted cultural bias about normality, abnormality, health, and unhealth. This example indicates the probability for not only cultural bias but also confirmation bias and bias blind spot in psychiatric diagnosis and psychiatric beliefs[citation needed].
In addition, many feel that they are being pathologized for simply being different. Some people diagnosed with Asperger syndrome or autism hold this position, particularly those involved in the autism rights movement or the autistic pride movement. While many parents of children diagnosed as autistic support the efforts of autistic activists, there are some who say they value the uniqueness of their children and do not desire a "cure" for their autism. The autistic community has coined a number of terms that would appear to form the basis for a new branch of identity politics; terms such as "neurodiversity" and "neurotypical".[39] However, an anti-psychiatric viewpoint is not found in nearly all of those advocating acceptance for autists or other "outsiders".
Furthermore, if a tendency toward self-harm is taken as an elementary symptom of mental illness, then humans, as a species, are arguably insane in that they have tended throughout recorded history to destroy their own environments, to make war with one another, etc.[40]
Tool of social control . . . According to Mike Fitzpatrick, resistance to medicalization was a common theme of the gay liberation, anti-psychiatry, and feminist movements of the 1970s, but now there is actually no resistance to the advance of government intrusion in lifestyle if it is thought to be justified in terms of public health.[51] Moreover, the pressure for medicalization also comes from society itself.[51] Feminists, who once opposed state intervention as oppressive and patriarchal, now demand more coercive and intrusive measures to deal with child abuse and domestic violence.[51] According to Richard Gosden, the use of psychiatry as a tool of social control is becoming obvious in preventive medicine programmes for various mental diseases.[52]:14 These programmes are intended to identify children and young people with divergent behavioral patterns and thinking and send them to treatment before their supposed mental diseases develop.[52]:14
"Therapeutic State" . . . The "Therapeutic State" is a phrase coined by Szasz in 1963.[82] The collaboration between psychiatry and government leads to what Szasz calls the "therapeutic state", a system in which disapproved actions, thoughts, and emotions are repressed ("cured") through pseudomedical interventions.[83][84]:17 Thus suicide, unconventional religious beliefs, racial bigotry, unhappiness, anxiety, shyness, sexual promiscuity, shoplifting, gambling, overeating, smoking, and illegal drug use are all considered symptoms or illnesses that need to be cured.[84]:17 When faced with demands for measures to curtail smoking in public, binge-drinking, gambling or obesity, ministers say that "we must guard against charges of nanny statism."[51] The "nanny state" has turned into the "therapeutic state" where nanny has given way to counselor.[51] Nanny just told people what to do; counselors also tell them what to think and what to feel.[51] The "nanny state" was punitive, austere, and authoritarian, the therapeutic state is touchy-feely, supportive — and even more authoritarian.[51] According to Szasz, "the therapeutic state swallows up everything human on the seemingly rational ground that nothing falls outside the province of health and medicine, just as the theological state had swallowed up everything human on the perfectly rational ground that nothing falls outside the province of God and religion."[78]:515 Faced with the problem of "madness," Western individualism proved to be ill-prepared to defend the rights of the individual: modern man has no more right to be a madman than medieval man had a right to be a heretic because if once people agree that they have identified the one true God, or Good, it brings about that they have to guard members and nonmembers of the group from the temptation to worship false gods or goods.[78]:496 A secularization of God and the medicalization of good resulted in the post-Enlightenment version of this view: once people agree that they have identified the one true reason, it brings about that they have to guard against the temptation to worship unreason — that is, madness.[78]:496 . . . Civil libertarians warn that the marriage of the State with psychiatry could have catastrophic consequences for civilization.[85] In the same vein as the separation of church and state, Szasz believes that a solid wall must exist between psychiatry and the State.[78]
. . . The gay rights or gay liberation movement is often thought to have been part of anti-psychiatry in its efforts to challenge oppression and stigma and, specifically, to get homosexuality removed from the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. However, a psychiatric member of APA's Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Issues Committee has recently sought to distance the two, arguing that they were separate in the early 70s protests at APA conventions and that APA's decision to remove homosexuality was scientific and happened to coincide with the political pressure. Reviewers have responded, however, that the founders and movements were closely aligned; that they shared core texts, proponents and slogans; and that others have stated that, for example, the gay liberation critique was "made possible by (and indeed often explicitly grounded in) traditions of antipsychiatry".[100][101]
. . . A criticism was made in the 1990s that three decades of anti-psychiatry had produced a large literature critical of psychiatry, but little discussion of the deteriorating situation of the mentally troubled in American society. Anti-psychiatry crusades have thus been charged with failing to put suffering individuals first, and therefore being similarly guilty of what they blame psychiatrists for. The rise of anti-psychiatry in Italy was described by one observer as simply "a transfer of psychiatric control from those with medical knowledge to those who possessed socio-political power".[23]