Author: William Glasser

Glasser qualified as a psychiatrist and then spent his career arguing against most of what psychiatry does. Reality Therapy, in 1965, dropped the search for causes in the past and asked the patient what they were choosing now. Choice Theory extends it: all behaviour is chosen in the service of five basic needs, external control damages relationships, and what gets called mental illness is in most cases an unsatisfying relationship rather than a disease of the brain. He opposed psychiatric medication for those conditions on the same reasoning. Mainstream psychiatry rejects the position. His ideas took hold most easily in schools. He died in 2013.