Anti Psychiatry, Critical Psychiatry and Post Psychiatry are three attacks on Psychiatric orthodoxy dating from the 1960s, 1990s and late 1990s respectively. They each call into question the validity of the disease model for mental illness, but take radically different approaches.

Antipsychiatry, whose most prominent exponents were RD Laing and Thomas Szasz (although these two individuals came from radically different perspectives themselves), is a premodernist critique of the modernist psychiatric project, arguing against the reductionist spirit of the medical model. See http://www.laingsociety.org/ and http://www.decaelo.com/rdlaing/.

For a more fringe view see http://www.antipsychiatry.org/. If you are a psychiatrist, sit down first.

Critical Psychiatry presents a modernist critique of Psychiatry, working essentially with the same presuppositions (that the scientific method is the best way to understand mental phenomena, and that some kind of 'truth' in scientific terms can be categorically stated about these events) but reaching different conclusions. See http://www.uea.ac.uk/~wp276/psychiatryanti.htm

Post Psychiatry is a post modernist critique, emphasising the variability of the usefulness of a western scientific perspective according to your frame of reference, and the unreliability of the assumptions of traditional Psychiatry. See     http://bmj.com/cgi/content/full/322/7288/724?ijkey=eceeaec5d85ecb1435188523f91e4cb19a00d40e&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha . It has some similarities to Bill Fulford's recent work on Value based Psychiatry http://www.newsandevents.warwick.ac.uk/index.cfm?page=204.

Post psychiatry has a number of facets, one of which is linked to the Therapeutic Community movement and the recently prominent emphasis on user empowerment and involvement. A useful place to start is the 2004 Maxwell Jones Lecture by Rex Haigh, reproduced here. See also lecture notes and presentation for seminar 1 on the ‘Personality: people and pathology’ course (PD training on the main menu).