Most people associated with the group are practicing consultant psychiatrists in the United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS), among them Dr Joanna Moncrieff.
Participants in the Critical Psychiatry Network share concerns about psychiatric practice where and when it is heavily dependent upon diagnostic classification and the use of psychopharmacology.
These concerns reflect their recognition of poor construct validity amongst psychiatric diagnoses and scepticism about the efficacy of anti-depressants, mood stabilisers and anti-psychotic agents.
[1] According to them, these concerns have ramifications in the area of the use of psychiatric diagnosis to justify civil detention and the role of scientific knowledge in psychiatry, and an interest in promoting the study of interpersonal phenomena such as relationship, meaning and narrative in pursuit of better understanding and improved treatment.
CPN has similarities and contrasts with earlier criticisms of conventional psychiatric practice, for example those associated with David Cooper, R. D. Laing and Thomas Szasz.
[4] The concern about these proposals caused a number of organizations to come together under the umbrella of the Mental Health Alliance[5] to campaign in support of the protection of patients' and carers' rights, and to minimise coercion.
[16] This has a number of consequences: First, the aggrandisement of biological research creates a false impression both inside and outside the profession of the credibility of the evidence used to justify drug treatments for disorders such as depression and schizophrenia.
In reality this is not the case, as re-examinations of drug trial data in meta-analyses, especially where unpublished data are included (publication bias means that researchers and drug companies do not publish negative findings for obvious commercial reasons), have revealed that most of the benefits seen in active treatment groups are also seen in the placebo groups.
For example, if we consider depression to be a biological disorder remediable through the use of antidepressant tablets, then we may be excused from having to delve into the tragic circumstances that so often lie at the heart the experience.
[22] There is a common theme, here, with the work of David Ingleby whose chapter in Critical Psychiatry: The Politics of Mental Health[23] sets out a detailed critique of positivism (the view that epistemology, or knowledge about the world is best served by empiricism and the scientific method rather than metaphysics).
[24] The most forceful critic of this view was R. D. Laing, who famously attacked the approach enshrined by Jaspers' and Kraepelin's work in chapter two of The Divided Self,[25] proposing instead an existential-phenomenological basis for understanding psychosis.
One of his most notable contributions to this area was setting up and evaluating the first Soteria House, an environment modeled on Kingsley Hall in which people experiencing acute psychoses could be helped with minimal drug use and a form of interpersonal phenomenology influenced by Heidegger.
[21] This culminated with the publication by Bradley Lewis, a psychiatrist based in New York, of Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry: The Birth of Postpsychiatry.
Instead, it prioritises values, meanings and relationships and sees progress in terms of engaging creatively with the service user movement, and communities.
This is especially important given the considerable evidence that in Britain, Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) communities are particularly poorly served by mental health services.
In identifying the modernist privileging of technical responses to madness and distress as a primary problem, postpsychiatry has looked to postmodernist thought for insights.
[47] CPN is involved in four main areas of work, writing and the publication of academic and other papers, organizing and participating in conferences, activism and support.
A glance at the members' publication page on the CPN website reveals in excess of a hundred papers, books and other articles published by people associated with the network over the last twelve years or so.