Charlotte Taylor-Page reports for Mad in the UK.
“Following the publication of Joanna Moncrieff and Mark Horowitz’s Chemical Imbalance review last month we at MITUK have been increasingly aware of the strongly held and often opposing opinions on social media. There are multiple voices in this field we broadly know as ‘mental health’, with clinical professionals, researchers, lived experience practitioners, service users and the mainstream media all with apparently different views.
We thought it might be useful to talk to some of the key figures in this sometimes contentious debate. From alleged associations with the Far-Right, to what the experiences we call ‘mental illness’ actually are, Charlotte Taylor-Page challenged some of the biggest voices on the broadly ‘critical’ side of the debate to find out what they actually believe.
It turned out to be a challenging task, trying to pin down what the critics actually think – or what they even want to be called – as it became apparent is there is no fixed, universal set of positions. The movement broadly critical of psychiatry does not exist as a monolith, and, as expected from a group of thinkers opposed to labels, many of them don’t want to be referred to as Critical Psychologists, ‘antipsychiatrists’ (see why that term is problematic here) or even ‘critical ‘at all! So, I am going to refer to the people I spoke to simply as ‘critics.’ …”
You can read more from here.
