Why did Michel Foucault’s ideas influence the antipsychiatry movement?

Michel Foucault’s ideas were highly influential to the antipsychiatry movement of the 1970s and 1980s, primarily through his critical examination of how Western society defines and treats those it classifies as "insane."1

In his work Madness and Civilization, Foucault argued that the concept of "reason" in Western philosophy and science was defined by excluding and marginalizing the "other"—specifically the insane. He demonstrated that this definition of reason was used to justify the oppression and "moral imprisonment" of individuals within asylums and through tortuous psychological treatments.2

By exposing how psychiatry and mental asylums functioned as structures of "power-knowledge"—where social power and governing systems of thought reinforce one another—Foucault provided a theoretical framework that challenged the legitimacy of established psychiatric practices. Although Foucault did not consider himself a member of the antipsychiatry movement, his critiques of the human sciences and his focus on the themes of domination and subjectivation deeply resonated with activists and scholars seeking to undermine fixed, repressive institutional truths.123