Psychiatry was also attacked in the 20th century by critics who denied the reality of all mental illness and who insisted that the entire enterprise of psychiatry was a threat to human rights. In their view, patients in psychiatric facilities were, until proven otherwise, victims of their families, their psychiatrists, and laws that should be declared unconstitutional. Mentally ill persons were an oppressed minority who had to be protected, especially from antipsychotic medications. Radical critics of psychiatry, such as Szasz, Laing, and Foucault, found allies in a generation of lawyers who championed their ideas in courts and legislatures. These efforts were sustained and supported in the United States and abroad by the Church of Scientology, whose members opposed the "materialistic" treatment methods (medications) of psychiatrists and who offered their own spiritual methods of healing.