»Problems With the "Antipsychiatry Movement"«

The fact that some people are helped by psych drugs does not diminish how harmful psychiatry has been overall. If people willingly take SSRIs or atypical neuroleptics or mood stabilizers or anything else, you'll get no argument from 90% of the anti-psychiatry movement. It's the issue of forced drugging, forced electroshock and incarceration that we oppose.

Yes, but the antipsychiatry movement claims as its intellectual leaders people like Thomas Szasz, who is a psychoanalyst with no clinical experience treating serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia, yet who states as one of his central principles that "mental illness is a myth." If we are to believe mental illness is a myth, why should those of us who show symptoms of it bother seeking treatment or encouraging other sufferers from mental illness to do the same without fear of stigma or abuse?

Furthermore, if 90% of you have no argument with voluntary psychiatry, how can you call yourselves "anti-psychiatry?" Isn't this like me starting an "anti-war movement," and then saying that "90% of us have no problem if people willingly go kill other people in wars, but we just oppose the draft?" In that case, I should call my movement an "anti-draft movement" rather than an "anti-war movement."

The only reasons I can see for you to continue to call yourselves an anti-psychiatry movement are: (1) You like the sound of "anti-psychiatry" because it gives you a convenient and widely-misperceived target (psychiatrists) for your rage, incitements, and accusations, such as those you, Francesca Allan, frequently post about the schizophrenia researcher E. Fuller Torrey; or (2) You are really against psychiatry in general, but claim not to oppose voluntary psychiatric treatment for whatever reason, whether it be to attract new followers among people who are unhappy with their treatment by psychiatrists or to assuage your own guilty consciences about the sick people you have hurt for your own political advantage.

In my opinion, the only thing an "anti-psychiatry movement" will accomplish is worsening stigma about the mentally ill and discouraging people who desperately need psychiatric treatment from seeking it, leading to more preventable assaults, suicides, homicides, and recreational drug abuse by the untreated mentally ill.

You can prattle on and on about how you don't oppose voluntary psychiatric treatment, but the subtext of your movement is that all psychiatry is harmful and worthless, as evidenced by the name of the movement itself.

And if psychiatry were to just go away (it won't), the void would very quickly be filled by the younger field of mental study, psychoanalysis, which, unlike psychiatry, has no empirical foundation whatsoever and appears to help only people who are actually healthy but malingering (feigning mental illness for personal reasons like a need for attention.)

Also, I wonder what Thomas Szasz would say about the personal experience I described here:
IMO → "Hospitalized" by MindSlave
He would certainly stand in opposition to my treatment in that hospital, as do I, but how would he explain the sudden and massive change in my thoughts and behavior that led to my hospitalization?

If mental illness is a myth, why did I live twenty-four relatively normal years, then suddenly and very painfully flip out in the space of a few months?