It was an "alternative journal" in the mental health field that published 12 issues between 1970 and 1972, and "voiced pointed criticisms of psychiatrists during this period".
[1] It was run by a group of psychiatrists and activists who believed that mental illness was best treated by social change, not behaviour modification.
[2] In the 1960s, a movement developed to challenge many principals of psychiatry and dispute the mental health system as a successful humanitarian enterprise.
This critical literature, with an associated left-wing activist movement, "emphasized the hegemony of medical model psychiatry, its spurious sources of authority, its mystification of human problems, and the more oppressive practices of the mental health system, such as involuntary hospitalisation, drugging, and electroshock".
[3] The Radical Therapist took shape in the winter of 1969, in Minot, North Dakota, the product of three officers in the U.S. Air Force Regional Hospital.
No other publication meets the need we feel exists: to unite all people concerned with the radical analysis of therapy in this society.
The other "professional" journals are essentially establishment organs which back the status quo on most controversial issues... We need a new forum for our views.
[2] The Manifesto promised that the journal would provide a needed forum for all people working in the therapy fields; work to liberate therapy, therapists and others from backwards ideology; help develop new training programs; encourage the elaboration of a new psychology of men and women, as well as a new concept of family and community life; foster the development of more responsive therapy programs under client control; encourage new techniques; and confront the various ways U.S. society uses mental health institutions to oppress various people.
The Radical Therapist also spoke out against the Vietnam War, racism, and the greed of consumerist society, and it was an early supporter of the struggle of mental patients for their rights.
Contributing editors and authors while the RT was in Minot included Joe Berke, Judith Brown, Phil Brown, Phyllis Chesler, Larry Constantine, Rona Fields, Dennis Jaffe, Kenneth Keniston, David Koulack, Rick Kunnes, Terry Kupers, Howard Levy, Robert Jay Lifton, Ken Locke, Peter Roemer, Kris Rosenthal, Steve Sharfstein, Pam Skinner, Claude Steiner, Irving Weisberg, Steve Wood and others.
Early issues of The Radical Therapist also reprinted and made more widely available articles such as Anne Koedt's "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm", Carol Hanish's "The Personal is Political", and Howard Levy's "Prison Psychiatry".
The issue began with an editorial by the feminist Judith Brown, and followed with the Redstockings' "Manifesto"; a critique of male supremacy, private property and the family by Carol Giardina; and a reprint of Naomi Weisstein's "Kinder, Kuche Kirche".
There were also articles by Kathie Sarachild, Phyllis Chesler, Marilyn Zweig, Martha Shelley, and others, as well as a Women's Liberation bibliography.
These included the therapists John Bayliss, Cynthia Ganung, and Chuck Robinson; as well as Anne Mine, Christine Nozchese and Laurin Pensel.
The RT quickly began publishing articles by its leaders, which were sharply critical of the therapy profession as a whole for tolerating and participating in a wide range of abusive psychiatric practices.
With the April 1972 issue (Volume Two, number 6), the collective changed the journal's name to Rough Times, and stopped being a publication aimed predominantly at mental health professionals.
An "RT Position Paper" laid out the staff's evolved position: support for worldwide socialist revolution; belief in the exploitation of labor as today's primary cause of people's oppression; support for all just liberation struggles; deep involvement in and support for the mental health/self-help struggle; belief that the psychological/psychiatric establishment per se is a tool of oppression and that mental illness is a myth; demands for an end to abuses of mental patients; dedication to a search for new, liberating ways of helping people in emotional pain; and at the same time an openness to working with therapy professionals who could identify with the interests of the people.
Its 10th anniversary issue in the summer of 1980 contained a personal retrospective article by Nancy Henley entitled "Ten Years in the Life of a Radical Psychology Journal".