R. D. Laing
I've been interested in the life and work of R. D. Laing for many years and believe that his ideas concerning mental health and particularly schizophrenia are as relevant today as when he first wrote about them in his groundbreaking book The Divided Self and subsequent writings in the 60´s and 70´s. I believe R. D. Laing is in the classic sense an outsider as described by the British author Colin Wilson:
"The problem for 'civilisation' is the adoption of a religious attitude that can be assimilated as objectively as the headlines of last Sunday's newspapers. But the problem for the individual always will be the opposite of this, the conscious striving not to limit the amount of experience seen and touched; the intolerable struggle to expose the sensitive areas of being to what may possibly hurt them; the attempt to see as a whole, although the instinct of self-preservation fights against the pain of internal widening, and all the impulses of spiritual laziness build into waves of sleep with every new effort. The individual begins that long effort as an outsider; he may finish it as a saint." (The Outsider)
R.D. Laing was as rebellious and unconventional as the likes of the antiestablishment writers of the Beat Generation i.e. Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs or musicians Bob Dylan and Sixto Díaz Rodríguez. He challenged the dominant ideas in regard to mental disorders and questioned the role of the psychiatrist in modern society. While he never denied the existence of mental illness, his exceptional and brilliant contribution was to offer a radically different approach than the mainstream psychiatry at the time, challenging doctors to stop treating people suffering from disorders like schizophrenia/psychosis as depersonalised and dehumanised objects and encouraging them to see the so-called patients as equals. Valuing their experiences meant for Laing to allow them to explore and work through their states of 'madness' in a positive and safe environment instead of suppressing the symptoms by using medication or electroshocks which was according to the Western tradition the only way of treatment. Kingsley Hall - a community project where doctors and patients lived together - became then one of Laing´s most radical experiments. Instead of dismissing the seemingly confused behaviour and enigmatic speech of people undergoing psychotic episodes, Laing validated their expression as a transformative experience comparable to the shamanistic journey in other cultures or mystical revelations. Laing pointed at the similarities between the exploration of the 'inner worlds' by schizophrenics and spiritual insights gained through meditation, LSD, etc.
In an interview re-published in http://www.dharmacafe.com, Laing clearly stated that the ego does not exist and is a 'cultural hallucination', distinguishing this way clearly between the ego and our authentic self as the ground of real experience: "We must disidentify ourselves from the ego and see it as a process, a systematic, reasonable coherent set of operations. What we call our ego we know to be always changing, immanent, transient, but still, we persist in this hallucination. The transcendental perspective is both, immanent and transcendental. So, one must simultaneously get into oneself and out of one´s ego. It is a return to ordinariness, as the ox-herding cycle of Japanese Zen Buddhism. A mountain finally becomes a mountain again, a tree a tree, a river a river."
For Laing the role of society and especially of family was crucial in the development of 'madness'. According to Laing, mental illness is a sane response to an insane world.
His own research into the causes of schizophrenia led him to mainly focus on the 'pressure cooker' of family life - in his opinion 'schizophrenia was the result of wrestling with two identities: the identity defined for us by our families and our authentic identity, as we experience ourselves to be. When the two are fundamentally different, it triggers an internal fracturing of the self.' (The Divided Self - Dr. Laing)
To investigate how power and control were exerted within 'normal' families and dissect what went on between their members, Laing applied the techniques of the Game theory since he had learned that scientists in the USA were using the Game theory to analyze human interactions. After asking 20 couples questions - like how they saw each other in their daily lives or what they thought the other secretly intended - he produced matrices that showed that couples used their everyday actions as strategies to control and manipulate each other - a result similar to the interactions shown between countries in the Cold War.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory
Laing was able to conclude that the dynamics of the family system gave the appearance of being driven by actions of love and kindness, but in reality, these actions were hidden agendas to assert power and domination. Family members actually viewed each other with suspicion and also assumed that the actions of others were manipulative and self-serving.
Clancy Sigal - writer and co-founder of the Philadelphia Association and the first community house Kingsley Hall - confirmed that Laing felt that the family was an arena for strategizing: "Love was a way that a person tried to dominate another person. 'I love you but, - I'm making a condition for that love which is impossible for you to fulfil'. 'There's nothing you can do to earn my love - although I'm telling you you have to earn my love'."
Based on his research Laing argued that the modern family, rather than being a loving, caring institution, was in reality a dark arena where people were involved in struggles playing selfish games with each other, resulting in a society not offering real stability but a black and limited existence for all the individuals involved.
R. D. Laing
US psychologist Dr. Robert Rosenhen felt inspired by Laing's criticism of the 'psychiatry establishment' and wanted to know if psychiatrists in the US really were able to distinguish between a sane individual and someone who was clinically diagnosed as insane, and his experiment became known as the 'Rosenhen experiment'.
David Rosenhen
Being sane in insane places
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Some might say that today, psychiatry is practised more humanely than it was 30 or 40 years ago. No doubt - Laing, a pioneer advocating for a humane and empathetic treatment of the mentally ill - has influenced many therapeutic communities around the world seeking to provide a safe and friendly place for people to integrate their seemingly 'insane' experiences.
In community houses today, interactions become meaningful and health-enhancing experiences. In a safe environment, people who are mentally 'unwell' can freely experiment with behaviours, changes and thoughts without fear of judgment or reprisal while being at the same time exposed to the struggles of others.
Not coercive methods and approaches of restraint, isolation, exclusion but respect and unconditional positive regard is what supports them to work through their issues, handle their difficulties and eventually find the 'exit' of their self created suffering.
In fairness I have known and had in the past professional association with several psychiatrists completely open to alternative healings options. Yet, people working in the field of mental health care tell me that today’s model, with its high prescription rate of psychotropic drugs to pre-teens and teenagers, is still oppressively controlled and driven by factors more concerned with profit than healthcare.
The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom, a documentary series by English filmmaker Adam Curtis, is in my opinion a brilliant presentation that consists of three 60-minute parts exploring the modern concept and definition of freedom, specifically "how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures, led to today's idea of freedom."
Part one has an excellent section on R D Laing's work.