A highly politicized group of psychiatrists and psychotherapists active in London in the 1960s and 1970s who rejected traditional definitions of madness as well as the (then) standard treatments for mental illness (e.g. electro-convulsive therapy, lobotomy, anti-psychotic drugs). It viewed madness as a social construct, or more strongly as an effect of the pressures society places on certain people. It saw psychosis as a shamanistic journey by means of which people tried to express the oppressive effects of socialization. The term itself was coined by Cooper, David, a South African psychiatrist who collaborated with Laing, Ronald David and others in the establishment of Kingsley Hall, an experiment in community-psychiatry started in 1965 in East London. Mary Barnes: Two Accounts of a Journey through Madness (1971), written by one of the patients at Kingsley Hall in collaboration with her psychiatrist Joseph Berke, offers a keen but not altogether flattering insight into what anti-psychiatry meant in practice. In fact, the book did the movement a lot of damage by exposing what many of its critics saw as its unethical practices. French philosopher, Foucault, Michel is often associated with the anti-psychiatry movement, but although his first book Folie et DĂ©raison: Histoire de la Folie Ă lâĂąge classique (1961), translated in abridged form as Madness and Civilization (1965) and in complete form as History of Madness (2006), was a powerful influence on Laing and Cooper in particular, he did not consider himself a part of the movement. Similarly, anti-psychoanalyst Guattari, FĂ©lix was influenced by some of the tenets of anti-psychiatry, but ultimately he rejected the movement as a failed experiment because in his eyes it did nothing to alleviate the suffering of schizophrenics. Further Reading: Z. Kotowicz R.D. Laing and the Paths of Anti-psychiatry (1997).