‘All the Fits That’s News to Print’: Deinstitutionalisation and Anti-Psychiatric Movement Magazines in the United States, 1970–1986

Abstract

This chapter analyses anti-psychiatric magazines that were at once the consequence of post-war deinstitutionalisation and participated in the further diversification of mental health care at a crucial time for US psychiatry. Dunst’s discussion focuses on two closely related but ultimately separate social movements—radical therapy and mental patients’ liberation—and the three publications that functioned as their public organs: The Radical Therapist, later renamed Rough Times and State and Mind (1970–76); Issues in Radical Therapy (1973–86) and Madness Network News (1972–86). Edited by mental health workers and former patients, sent out to thousands of subscribers and sold in countercultural bookstores, these movement periodicals helped spread ideas and stimulated debates between professionals and non-professionals. Most importantly, perhaps, these publications acted as decentralised therapeutic spaces at a time when former patients found themselves housed in welfare hostels and care homes, or even living on the streets, facing economic insecurity and social stigma.