Break on Through: Radical Psychiatry and the American Counterculture

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Lucas Richert, Director of the American Institute for the History of Pharmacy, breaks through the assumptions and breaks down the history of the radical challenges to psychiatry and the conventional treatment of mental health in the 1970s.The upheavals of the 1960s gave way to a decade of disruptions in the 1970s, and among the rattled fixtures of American society was mainstream psychiatry. A "Radical Caucus" formed within the psychiatric profession and the "antipsychiatry" movement arose. Critics charged that the mental health establishment was complicit with the military-industrial complex, patients were released from mental institutions, and powerful antipsychotic drugs became available. Meanwhile, practitioners and patients experimented with new approaches to mental health, from primal screaming and the therapeutic use of psychedelics to a new reliance on quantification. In Break on Through, Lucas Richert investigates the decade's radical mental health practices and the lessons they offer for current debates. Richert discusses anti-Vietnam War activism and the new diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder given to some veterans, the radical psychiatrists who fought the system (and each other), the entry of New Age-style therapies, including Esalen's Human Potential Movement, into the laissez-faire therapeutic marketplace of the 1970s, the development of DSM III, and the use of LSD, cannabis, and MDMA.