The keynote speaker at the Critical Psychiatry Network conference in Birmingham on 26 April 2002 is David Ingleby, Professor of Intercultural Psychology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He was the editor of the book Critical Psychiatry: The Politics of Mental Health published by Penguin in 1981 (Ingleby's chapter in the book is reprinted at http://www.critpsynet.freeuk.com/InglebyCritical.htm). This publication was the first use of the term "critical psychiatry" in the literature.

Ingleby's book was reviewed by Peter Sedgwick in New Society in April 1981 (reprinted on Critical Psychiatry Network website). Sedgwick also comments on Ingleby's failure to obtain a tenured lectureship at Cambridge University for which Sedgwick had been asked to provide a testimonial. Sedgwick's testimonial was favourable, but rumours claimed that Ingleby had been turned down because of adverse (indeed hostile) reports from his referees. Another referee had been Sir Martin Roth, professor of psychiatry in Cambridge at the time and a figure of national eminence, having been the first president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

Roth wrote a monograph with Jerome Kroll entitled The Reality of Mental Illness (1986). It represents the culmination of traditional psychiatry's response to what has been called 'anti-psychiatry'. Anti-psychiatry, exemplified by psychiatrists such as R. D. Laing and Thomas Szasz, is commonly perceived as a passing phase in the history of psychiatry. From this perspective, the book by Roth and Kroll is seen as providing the final 'death-blow' to the intellectual argument of anti-psychiatry.

It was commonly supposed that Martin Roth's reference on David Ingleby prevented him obtaining tenure at Cambridge University. Yet David Ingleby's views do deserve an airing, as Sedgwick says in his book review. Moreover, again to quote from Sedgwick, they "are free from the Laingian and Szaszian excesses which have given anti-psychiatry such a rotten reputation." Sedwick may be wrong to blame the poor reputation of anti-psychiatry on these excesses, rather than to see the poor reputation as engendered by mainstream psychiatry to undermine the impact of any criticism of its biomedical viewpoint. It is now almost heretical to take a critical position in psychiatry.

The Critical Psychiatry Network, like Ingleby and Sedgwick, wants to avoid the polarisation of psychiatry and anti-psychiatry. It places anti-psychiatry in its broader cultural context and sees it in terms of its continuities rather than discontinuities. The force and freshness of critical psychiatry in western culture should not be underestimated.

These themes are taken up in the Network's latest conference at which David Ingleby will be the keynote speaker. The title of the conference is Beyond Drugs and Custody: Renewing Mental Health Practice (conference programme).