Preliminary Material -- Notes on Contributors -- Introduction: Cultures of Psychiatry and Mental Health Care in Postwar Britain and the Netherlands / Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra -- Restructuring Mental Health Services in Twentieth Century Britain / Joan Busfield -- Dutch Psychiatry after World War II: An Overview / Paul Schnabel -- Before Anti-Psychiatry: 'Mental Health' in Wartime Britain / Mathew Thomson -- Psychiatry and Society: The Dutch Mental Hygiene Movement 1924-1960 / Leonie de Goei -- 'They Used to Call it Psychiatry': Aspects of the Development and Impact of Psychopharmacology / E. M. Tansey -- LSD and the Dualism between Medical and Social Theories of Mental Illness / Stephen Snelders -- R. D. Laing in Scotland: Facts and Fictions of the 'Rumpus Room' and Interpersonal Psychiatry / Jonathan Andrews -- "Messiah of the Schizophrenics": Jan Foudraine and Anti-Psychiatry in Holland / Gemma Blok -- The Dennendal Experiment, 1969-1974: The Legacy of a Tolerant Educative Culture / Ido Weijers -- Enemies Within: Postwar Bethlem and the Maudsley Hospital / Keir Waddington -- The Changing Professional Identity of the Dutch Psychiatrist 1960-1970 / Harry Oosterhuis and Saskia Wolters -- From the Asylum to the Community: The Mental Patient in Postwar Britain / Peter Barham -- The Battle Against Peace-Keeping Frustrations: Psychiatrists and Psychologists in the Dutch Army / Hans Binneveld -- Anti-Psychiatry and the Family: Taking the Long View / Roy Porter -- Raising the Anti: Jan Foudraine, Ronald Laing and Anti-Psychiatry / Colin Jones -- The View from the North Sea / David Ingleby -- Index.

Anti-psychiatry' is a movement more sloganized than analysed. Until now it has been associated in the English-speaking world primarily with R.D. Laing and a coterie of his associates, and a radical critique not just of psychiatric hospitalization but of the very premises of psychiatry itself and the basic institutions of society, especially the family. But are these notions accurate, or rather distorted images, created by Laing himself or by the media? In this book, which has emerged out of an Anglo-Dutch conference held in June 1997, the realities of critical psychiatry are explored, using comparisons and contrasts between the British and the Dutch experiences as a probe. There were, it turns out, various distinct anti-psychiatries - indeed, hardly anybody actually used that label about themselves - and they played a role in the reform no less than the rejection of regular psychiatry.

Description based on print version record.