This is particularly so in psychiatry, where clinical neuroscience has driven a political agenda inflamed by distorted media coverage of high profile 'failures' of community care, in which risk reduction is of paramount importance. The result is legislation that attaches more importance to forcing people to take medication. Psychiatry has always been deeply split between care and healing on the one hand, and coercion and social control on the other. Government legislation, in shifting the balance away from care towards control, is making this split even clearer. No other medical speciality has the equivalent of the psychiatric survivors movement, confirmation of the coercive nature of psychiatry.
Critical psychiatry is part academic, part practical.
Theoretically it is influenced by critical philosophical and political theories, and it has three elements. Critical psychiatry is deeply sceptical about the reductionist claims of neuroscience to explain psychosis and other forms of emotional distress. It follows that we are sceptical about the claims of the pharmaceutical industry for the role psychotropic drugs in the 'treatment' of psychiatric conditions. Like other psychiatrists we use drugs, but we see them as having a minor role in the resolution of psychosis or depression. We attach greater importance to dealing with social factors, such as unemployment, bad housing, poverty, stigma and social isolation.