In this book David Cooper examines the pro-gressive steps in social invalidation by which a person becomes a schizophrenic and is thereafter medically confirmed and maintain-ed in this identity. He takes as his starting-point the thesis that mainstream psychiatry, preoccupied with the concepts and methods of the natural sciences, has evolved in ways that are largely irrelevant to the human situ-ation. He proposes a radical social re-evalua-tion of 'madness', outlines a new methodo-logical approach to problems of personal interaction, and gives an exposition of a new family-interpersonal model of schizophrenia, including by way of illustration a case history in which the career of a young schizophrenic is made intelligible in terms of the vicissitudes of his family life.
An account is given of 'Villa 21', a unit for schizophrenics in a large mental hospital near London, in which conventional psychiatric attitudes and methods have significantly shif-ted or have been eliminated or reversed. This account illustrates the idea of the anti-hospital. An appendix presents the results of research in family-oriented therapy of schizophrenia.
This is a challenging book, but it is also a humane book. Dr Cooper, who is associated with R. D. Laing and A. Esterson in develop-ing a phenomenological and existential con-ception of madness, sees in the orthodox psychiatric classification and treatment of the mentally ill a form of collusion, by which, as he puts it, we seek to elect others to live out the chaos that we refuse to confront in our-selves.
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