9. Michel Foucault (1926–84): French philosopher who criticized psychiatry as a repressive social force legitimizing the abuse of power

The book is filled with vivid descriptions of patients Laing had treated, accompanied with the most moving and imaginative interpretations of their dilemma. The impression given of psychosis by The Divided Self was of a tormented and rather heroic individual communicating vivid, authentic experiences, only to be met with a cowardly and mean-spirited rejection from society. Although he did

 

10. R. D. Laing (1927–1989): the most influential and iconic of the antipsychiatrists of the 1960s and 1970s

 

 

11. The remains of the psychiatry department in Tokyo – students burnt it down after r. D. Laing’s lecture in 1969

not deny the suffering, his was essentially a romantic view of madness which (paradoxically) increased recruitment into psychiatry at the same time that it attacked it. Like Szasz, Laing never called himself an anti-psychiatrist (a term coined by his colleague David Cooper in 1967), and continued to practise, albeit in unorthodox ways.

  Laing’s second ‘phase’ was his belief that families contributed to schizophrenia by denying the emerging identity of their child. Sanity, Madness and the Family: Families of Schizophrenics, with Aaron Esterson, cast schizophrenia as a response to repressive and rejecting parenting. The film inspired by it (Family Life, 1971) struck an international chord. Laing’s third phase was inspired by his extensive experimentation with LSD, so common at that time. The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise, published in 1967, conceived of psychosis as a psychedelic voyage of discovery in which the boundaries of perception were widened, and consciousness expanded.

  Laing was an improbable candidate for such an influential role. He started his psychiatric career as an army psychiatrist. His personal life was turbulent, with several marriages and many children. As a lecturer he ranged from the inspirational to the frankly intoxicated and unintelligible. His ability to galvanize anti-establishment feeling was so powerful that after a lecture to the student body in Tokyo in 1972 they went off and burnt down the department of psychiatry! He remained a radical until his death, aged 62, surprising all who knew him by collapsing while engaged in the outrageously bourgeois activity of playing tennis on the French Riviera.

Anti-psychiatry in the 21st century

  The contradictions inherent in psychiatry which generated the anti-psychiatry movement in the 1960s and 1970s have not gone away. Mind and brain, freedom and coercion, the right to be different (perhaps even the duty to be different), nature and nurture remain live issues. Many (though by no means all) ex-patient groups have become militantly anti-psychiatric, often referring to themselves as ‘survivors’ rather than patients, clients, or service users. In Germany and Holland the state contributes to hostels and crash pads for individuals who have ‘escaped’ routine mental health services. The most high-profile anti-psychiatry group is probably the Church of Scientology. While much of their focus is on controversial treatments such as brain surgery and ECT (Chapter 6), they are critical of the whole endeavour. They would argue that we should avoid artificial and technological approaches to human suffering and seek alternative personal routes to relief.

  Overall, however, there is now much less concerted opposition to psychiatry as a discipline. This may, in part, be due to a somewhat exaggerated faith in the rapid expansion of ‘biological’ explanations and an optimism that genetic and genomic advances will soon render the whole issue academic. However, while there is less conceptual opposition to psychiatry, there is no shortage of disquiet about various aspects of its practice. We turn to these now in Chapter 6.