the quality of the therapeutic relationship as seen by the patient, and the placebo effect in medication) are more important than the specific factors. postpsychiatry tries to move beyond the view that we can only help people through technologies and expertise. instead, it prioritises values, meanings and relationships and sees progress in terms of engaging creatively with the service user movement, and communities. this is especially important given the considerable evidence that in britain, black and minority ethnic (bme) communities are particularly poorly served by mental health services. for this reason an important practical aspect of postpsychiatry is the use of community development in order to engage with these communities. the community development project sharing voices bradford is an excellent example of such an approach. there are many commonalities between critical psychiatry and postpsychiatry, but it is probably fair to say that whereas postpsychiatry would broadly endorse most aspects of the work of critical psychiatry, the obverse does not necessarily hold. in identifying the modernist privileging of technical responses to madness and distress as a primary problem, postpsychiatry has looked to postmodernist thought for insights. its conceptual critique of traditional psychiatry draws on ideas from philosophers such as heidegger, merleau-ponty, foucault and wittgenstein. anti-psychiatry and critical psychiatry main article: anti-psychiatry the word anti-psychiatry is associated with the south african psychiatrist david cooper, who used it to refer to the ending of the 'game' the psychiatrist plays with his or her victim (patient). it has been widely used to refer to the writings and activities of a small group of psychiatrists, most notably r.d. laing, aaron esterson, cooper, and thomas szasz (although he rejects the use of the label in relation to his own work, as did laing and esterson), and sociologists (thomas scheff). szasz discards even more what he calls the quackery of 'antipsychiatry' than the quackery of psychiatry. anti-psychiatry can best be understood against the counter-cultural context in which it arose. the decade of the 1960s was a potent mix of student rebellion, anti-establishment sentiment and anti-war (vietnam) demonstrations. it saw the rise to prominence of feminism and the american civil rights movement and the northern ireland civil rights movement. across the world, formerly colonised peoples were throwing off the shackles of colonialism. some of these themes emerged in the dialectics of liberation, a conference organized by laing and others in the round house in london in 1968. critical psychiatry network - activities cpn is involved in four main areas of work, writing and the publication of academic and other papers, organizing and participating in conferences, activism and support. a glance at the members' publication page on the cpn website reveals in excess of a hundred papers, books and other articles published by people associated with the network over the last twelve years or so. these cover a wide range of topics, from child psychiatry, psychotherapy, the role of diagnosis in psychiatry, critical psychiatry, philosophy and postpsychiatry, to globalization and psychiatry. cpn has also organized a number of conferences in the past, and continues to do so in collaboration with other groups and bodies. it has run workshops for psychiatrists and offers peer supervision face to face and via videolink. it also supports service user and survivor activists who campaign against the role of the pharmaceutical industry in psychiatry, and the campaign for the abolition of the schizophrenia label. the cpn has published a statement in support.