8 articles
Anti-psychiatry
Anti-psychiatry: international movement of the 1960s, led by R.D. Laing, David Cooper (who coined the term), and Thomas Szasz, rejecting psychiatry's medical model and institutional power; distinct from critical psychiatry and the psychiatric survivors movement.
Conversion therapy
Conversion therapy, also called reparative therapy or SOCE/GICE, attempts to change a person's sexual orientation or gender identity. It lacks efficacy, is linked to depression and suicide risk, and is banned in Malta, Germany, France, and other states.
Drapetomania
Drapetomania, from Greek drapetes (runaway slave) plus mania, was a pseudoillness coined in 1851 by physician Samuel A. Cartwright to explain enslaved people fleeing captivity; now rejected as scientific racism.
Goldwater rule
The Goldwater rule is Section 7.3 of the American Psychiatric Association's ethics code (1973), barring psychiatrists from offering professional opinions on public figures without a personal examination, after the 1964 Fact magazine poll of Barry Goldwater.
Psychopathography of Adolf Hitler
Psychopathography of Adolf Hitler: retrospective psychiatric and psychoanalytic diagnoses of the dictator, from the 1940 Lancet debate and Langer's 1943 OSS profile to Redlich's 1999 medical review, the Pasewalk myth, and 2025 DNA claims.
Rosenhan experiment
The Rosenhan experiment, or Thud experiment, was a 1973 Stanford study in which eight healthy pseudopatients were admitted to psychiatric hospitals and diagnosed as ill.
Shirley Ardell Mason
Shirley Ardell Mason, aka Sybil, 1923-1998, Minnesota-born artist and psychiatric patient of Cornelia Wilbur, subject of the 1973 book Sybil; her 16-personality case was later shown to be largely fabricated.
Thomas Szasz
Thomas Szasz (1920–2012), Hungarian-born American psychiatrist at SUNY Syracuse, author of The Myth of Mental Illness (1961), who argued mental illness is a metaphor for problems in living and opposed involuntary psychiatry, the insanity defense, and drug prohibition.