Whenever young Frank Crompton accompanied his grand mother on the bus through Worcester, England, in the 1950s, she made him put a bag over his head as the bus drove by Powick Psychiatric Hospital." Don't look that way or you'll get damaged by it," she would say. 1 The stigma of Powick was widespread in the local community.Beryl Kendall, whose mother was institutionalized at Powick, remembers...
Reviewed by: Break on Through: Radical Psychiatry and the American Counterculture by Lucas Richert Wendy Kline Lucas Richert. Break on Through: Radical Psychiatry and the American Counterculture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2019. 210 pp. Ill. $26.95 (978-0-262-04282-6). Historians Beth Bailey and David Farber once referred to the 1970s as "our strangest decade." Unlike scholarship on the...
Chapter 3, “Psychedelic Birth: The Emergence of the Hippie Midwife,” explores the home birth experience from the perspective of the counterculture. In this context, childbirth became a catalyst to spiritual transcendence. At the same time, new developments in psychiatric research and the proliferation of psychoactive substances created a vibrant, albeit surprising, intellectual exchange between...