AbstractDuring the 1970s various professionals and social activists adopted an explicitly anti‐psychiatry position which was perceived by many as a new phenomenon. Hostility to psychiatry actually predates the establishment of psychiatry as a profession in 1844, and organized opposition to psychiatric practices appeared in the late nineteenth century. The deinstitutionalization of the 1970s, which was aided by developments within psychiatry, had a strong anti‐psychiatry component, but the novel aspect was the organization of ex‐mental patients themselves. By the 1980s the decline of psychiatric power, dissension among ex‐patients, and new social trends vitiated the anti‐psychiatry