Critical psychiatry and critical psychology grew from a long-running uneasiness with the idea that human suffering can be adequately understood as medical disorder. 

That uneasiness became especially visible in the 1960s and 1970s, when figures such as Thomas Szasz, R. D. Laing, David Cooper, Michel Foucault, and others challenged psychiatric diagnosis, institutionalization, coercive treatment, and the tendency to reduce complicated human experiences to presumed biological illnesses. 

In later decades, critical psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists, researchers, psychiatric survivors, and other reformers extended the critique, questioning the scientific foundations of diagnostic categories and calling greater attention to trauma, social circumstances, meaning, relationship, power, and lived experience. In related efforts, psychotherapy, psychological testing, and cognitive science likewise came under close scrutiny. 

My own work has belonged to this broad movement for many years. In books including Rethinking Depression, The Future of Mental Health, and Humane Helping, I have argued that many of the experiences routinely labeled “mental disorders” are better approached as human difficulties requiring understanding rather than reflexive diagnosing. 

My particular contribution has been not only to criticize the dominant model but also to ask the next, harder question: If we move beyond the medical model, how should we understand human suffering, and how should we help?

That question led me to create and serve as lead editor for the Ethics International Press Critical Psychology and Critical Psychiatry Series, an international, multi-volume effort bringing together leading thinkers to examine the existing paradigm and, increasingly, to develop humane theoretical and practical alternatives to it.