About this book
Overview
"Break on Through examines the mental health profession, activism, and the American mind in the 1970s. In exploring 'radicalism' and 'anti-psychiatry', Lucas Richert helps the reader understand changes in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and struggles within the American Psychiatric Association but he also sheds new light on emergent mental health therapies (transactional analysis, Primal Therapy), Scientology, and the rise of parapsychology. Disputes in the field of psychiatry over homosexuality, drug use, or replicable drug trials, were but one element of wider political, economic, and cultural change. The politics of the era mattered particularly, as did the cultural trends, individual patients, and economic developments. The book offers a fresh view of the difficult struggles within psychiatry in the turbulent 1960-1970s. While there is a great deal of research on the coercive and overreaching power of the psychiatry profession and the medico-corporate establishment, on specific classes of psychiatric drugs, and the debates between bio-medically oriented psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, there is limited work about radical unrest within psychiatry. More broadly, by locating radical psychiatrists in the spectrum of health movements, Break on Through adds to our understanding of American health activism. Using a wide-ranging set of archival sources and a clear style, Break on Through draws on intersecting stories in psychiatry, policy, and drug development and regulation, to offer recommendations for the future. In the face of rising diagnoses for depression and ADHD, the need for common measures and standardized approaches in mental health, and major developments in drug regulation, the book's historical perspectives could not be timelier"--
