Some libertarians have opposed psychiatry or abuses of psychiatry on constitutional or other legal grounds. Among other popular movements against psychiatry are: the Psychiatric survivors movement (including such groups as MindFreedom and International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology); persons charged with abuse based on repressed memories; political prisoners of totalitarian regimes; believers in a range of anti-realist ideas including the theory of reality enforcement; and certain documenters of the Nazi holocaust. The United States Libertarian Party can also be associated with anti-psychiatry as it has opposed involuntary commitment in its platform. Anti-realists have argued that the definition of a "lack of capacity to recognize reality," both clinically and legally, constitutes or could constitute a direct attack on their ideas. Holocaust documenters point out that Medicalization of social problems and systematic Euthanasia of people in German mental institutions in the 1930s provided the institutional, procedural, and doctrinal origins of racial Mass murder of the 1940s. The Nuremberg Trials convicted a number of physicians, mostly psychiatrists, who held key positions in both eras of Nazi murder, providing further overlap between psychiatry and oppression, according to Szasz and others. A sermon against the earlier practice by Bishop August Clemens Graf von Galen of Münster delivered on August 3, 1941, is credited with inspiring a group of young medical students to publish anti-Hitler pamphlets in 1942 and 1943, in the name of White Rose.
Cooper was a Marxist. Many Marxists oppose contemporary psychiatry, but the anti-psychiatry movement is by no means homogenous ideologically. Szasz opposed Marxism, instead approaching what he saw as psychiatry's problems from a libertarian perspective, by arguing that any form of socialism would lead to more medicalization and the strengthening of psychiatry.
Most, if not all, antipsychiatrists oppose inhumane treatment of mental patients (or even their status as 'mental patients' in the first place), either through the damaging effects of long-term institutionalization or the use of specific interventions given without Informed consent. Electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, has been used to sedate and punish difficult psychiatric patients rather than for therapeutic purposes (although how frequently and under what circumstances is debated), and some psychiatrists oppose ECT based on studies of its safety and effectiveness. Others, such as Szasz and Breggin, contend even accepted therapeutic practices remain instruments of social control. Punitive use of 'treatment', including ECT, isolation, and restraint has diminished somewhat, but anti-psychiatrists assert it still occurs regularly.
There has been a resurgence of ECT research and treatment in the past 20 years, for treatment of a wide range of mental illnesses including severe depression, but many things about ECT are still poorly understood, including exactly how ECT works. Most scientific studies conclude that ECT as performed today is a relatively safe and humane practice, but opponents of the practice allege that ECT causes brain damage and has killed several patients on whom it was used, some without their consent.
Observation of the abuses of psychiatry in the Soviet Union also led to questioning of the validity of the practice of psychiatry in the West. In particular, the diagnosis of political dissidents in the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic with Sluggishly progressing schizophrenia, led some to question either the existence of Schizophrenia, its diagnostic criteria, its prevalence, or to allege that at least in some cases the diagnosis is used punitively against dissidents in the West. There is some evidence (and many would argue that there is more than some evidence) that psychiatry is used as a coercive arm of various groups in the United States against dissidents and whistleblowers today ; very few would argue that psychiatric diagnoses have never been used in an improper or politicised way.
Some, such as Szasz and Breggin, argue the body of information making up the discipline consists mostly of vague and non-falsifiable hypotheses, or, worse, hypotheses not testable without resorting to unconscionable and inhumane experiments on human beings. The indeterminacy of psychiatric diagnoses make it useful as a mechanism of social control, according to these authors.
During the 1970s, the anti-psychiatry movement acquired sufficient respectability to advocate and effect restraint from many of the worst psychiatric abuses. Jurists such as David Bazelon brought legal force and stature to anti-psychiatry sentiments. Still, in the modern therapeutic culture, often reliant upon pharmaceuticals as an important part of Psychotherapy, those who question the ethics and efficacy of psychiatric practice in general remain outside the mainstream.
While the anti-psychiatric movement and in particular the Psychiatric Survivors Movement has in general operated nonviolently or even consciously based its activities on the principels of Nonviolence, there have been examples of sabotage and violence that are arguably anti-psychiatric or directed against coercive psychiatry. For instance, in 1993 a man in downstate Michigan caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage to mental hospitals.
Anthropological studies have been interpreted as suggesting roughly equivalent percentages of people in a variety of cultures, some very different to modern Western culture, develop behaviors recognized by that culture as deviant, with symptoms similar to schizophrenia. However, the lower rates of diagnosis for the forms of schizophrenia accepted in Western Europe than in the United States have led some to question the criteria for diagnosis, and even speculate that in some cases schizophrenia is deliberately misdiagnosed in the United States as a means of political or philosophical repression or as the result of increasing pharmaceutical industry marketing influence upon mental health professionals. DSM-IV-TR also notes that there is "a far higher incidence [of schizophrenia] for second generation African Caribbeans living in the United Kingdom."
The form of treatment also may vary according to criteria that some find suspect; young African American males in the United States are disproportionately prescribed high doses of 'anti-psychotic' medication, and African Americans are disproportionately subjected to involuntary commitment.
Many people diagnosed with a mental illness or illnesses - and many of those who have family members or close friends who have been diagnosed with mental illness - find the views of the anti-psychiatry movement contrary to their own experience with mental illness. They believe the very real and terrible suffering produced by mental illnesses have been effectively relieved by psychiatry and social treatment programs. One of their strongest advocates is Dr. E. Fuller Torrey.
It should be noted, however, that many persons diagnosed with certain mental disorders do hold a view similar to that of anti-psychiatry: notably, some people diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome or Autism appear to hold this position (see Autism rights movement) although some parents of children diagnosed autistic seem to be against it.
As Thomas Szasz points out, one of implications of the argument that mental illness does not exist is the Insanity defense would thus be abolished. He insists someone who has killed someone under the influence of Psychosis should be fully criminally responsible for his actions. This position is regarded as inhumane by many people. However, despite perceptions caused by sensationalist news stories, most people with psychiatric labels suffer violence by others more than they commit violence.
Some anti-psychiatry activists point out that the "insanity defence" is almost invariably of no advantage to criminal defendants. Rather than serving their sentences in jail, psychiatric prisoners serve them in hospitals where they are subjected to forced drugging and forced electroshock. In many cases, defendants actually serve longer sentences in psychiatric hospitals and, in all cases, terms are indefinite and are essentially at the discretion of the director of the psychiatric facility.
A number of individuals and advocacy groups have criticized certain State statutes in the US providing for involuntary commitment, as unconstitutional violations of the First, Fourth or Fifth Amendments (however, there have been court rulings that the Fifth Amendment is not applicable to these cases, being only applicable to criminal cases). They argue that, in those cases in which the statements or writings of the individual examined by a psychiatrist - who will possibly be certified as being in need of treatment - forms the basis for the diagnosis, then the deprivation of liberty which will result (if the individual is so found) will actually be a result of his speech or writing, and testimony taken while in custody, would therefore be in violation of the United States Constitution.
Fifth Amendment concerns have been somewhat ameliorated in some jurisdictions, which have provided statutory equivalents of Fifth-Amendment rights in involuntary commitment cases.
In 1998 Szasz and others staged the Foucault Tribunal on the State of Psychiatry in Berlin (named for the Philosopher Michel Foucault, who conceptualized madness in the History of Madness in the Classical Age (1961), and other works, as a social construction enforcing a definition of normality eminently useful to the functioning of power over bodies). This tribunal reached what could be said to be a preordained verdict -- that, among other things, "We demand the abolition of the mental patients laws as a first step toward making psychiatry accountable to society."
Many of the premises of anti-psychiatry have been adopted by psychologists working to treat mental disorders without medication, including sexual addiction counselor, Joe Zychik and David Keirsey, a clinical therapist and author of several books on temperament traits.
One organization often tied with the anti-psychiatry movement is the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), founded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and Dr. Thomas Szasz, who has continued to support this group over the years, though not associated with Scientology. Scientology has used its considerable financial resources, funneled through CCHR, to wage media campaigns against various psychiatrists, psychiatric organizations, and pharmaceutical companies (especially Eli Lilly). According to Time Magazine, Dr. Breggin admits that he was once an ally of Scientology and that his wife was a member. The prominence of Dr. Szasz - a co-founder of the CCHR - within the anti-psychiatry movement adds to this confusion. One controversial offshoot of the anti-Psychiatry movement is the Pro-ana movement, whose members argue Anorexia nervosa is an Alternative lifestyle rather than a disorder.