The Radical Therapist

The Radical Therapist was a journal that emerged in the early 1970s in the context of the counter-culture and the radical U.S. antiwar movement. It was an "alternate journal" in the mental health field that published 12 issues between 1970 and 1972, and "voiced pointed criticisms of psychiatrists during this period". It was run by a group of psychiatrists and activists who believed that mental illness was best treated by social change, not behaviour modification. Their motto was "Therapy means social, political and personal change, not adjustment".

In the 1960s, a movement developed to challenge many principals of psychiatry and dispute the mental health system as a successful humanitarian enterprise. The challenge came from Ernest Becker, Erving Goffman, R.D. Laing, Thomas Scheff, and Thomas Szasz. Their writings, along with articles in the journal The Radical Therapist, were given the umbrella label anti-psychiatry despite wide divergences in philosophy. 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".

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. The idea for the journal came from Michael Glenn, a psychiatrist who had recently arrived as Chief of Neurology and Psychiatry. He was joined by David Bryan, the hospital social worker, and by Michael Galan, an MBA working in the hospital business office. The three of them further developed the idea, and — with Sara Glenn and Linda Bryan — formed the Radical Therapist Collective. The Collective solicited articles, contributing editors and subscriptions, and worked to produce and distribute the journal. After a year, they were joined by Deborah Levitt, from Bennington, Vermont, who had traveled cross-country to work with them. Their manifesto stated:

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