Cultures of Psychiatry and Mental Health Care in Postwar Britain and The Netherlands

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.

Mariijke Gijswijt-Hofstra is Professor of Social and Cultural History at the University of Amsterdam. She has published on the granting of asylum in the Dutch Republic, deviance and tolerance (16-20th centuries), witchcraft and cultures of misfortune (16-20th centuries), the reception of homœpathy in the Netherlands (19-20th centuries), and on women and alternative health care in the Netherlands (20th century). She has recently edited in English, with Hilary Marland and Hans de Waardt, Illness and Healing Alternatives in Western Europe (London: Routledge, 1997).
Roy Porter is Professor in the Social History of Medicine at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine. Recent books include Doctor of Society: Thomas Beddoes and the Sick Trade in Late Enlightenment England (London: Routledge, 1991), London: A Social History (Hamish Hamilton, 1994), and ‘The Greates Benefit to Mankind’: A Medical History of Humanity (London: HarperCollins, 1997). He is currently working on a general history of the Enlightenment in Britain. He is interested in eighteenth century medicine, the history of psychiatry and the history of quackery.