Critical Psychiatry Network
psychiatric organization based in the United Kingdom
The Critical Psychiatry Network (CPN) is a group of psychiatrists who advocate for reform towards a more reflective, skeptical and patient-centered approach to psychiatry. CPN was created in January 1999 by psychiatrists in the United Kingdom, in response to proposals by the British government to amend the Mental Health Act 1983. The network was concerned about the potential for increased coercion in the act. Among their founders was Joanna Moncrieff, current co-chair of the network.
"Critical psychiatry" can be contrasted with "anti-psychiatry", which is more abolitionist than reformative.
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. 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. Features of CPN are pragmatism and full acknowledgment of the suffering commonly associated with mental health difficulties.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5186751. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1999 and 1983.
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This entry incorporates text from “Critical Psychiatry Network” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.