Psychiatry has not always been a controversial field of work, but what is clear is that it has always had a direct effect on the lives of many people. That is why, especially in the first half of the 20th century, there was a strong questioning of the way in which health institutions managed the treatment of people with mental disorders.

One of the representatives of this stream of demands was Ronald David Laing, a controversial Scottish psychiatrist who dedicated a good part of his life to questioning the limits of psychiatry and madness as a concept.

Who was R.D. Laing? Brief biography

R. D. Laing was born in Glasgow in 1927. He studied medicine in the same city and later worked as a psychiatrist in the British army, where he became interested in researching the role of stress in mental health.

In the year 1965. R. D. Laing opened the Philadelphia Association , an institution that offers training to mental health professionals and, at the same time, treatment to patients. In addition, he opened a project where therapists and patients lived together.

Laing’s goal was to push for a much more humanistic approach to psychiatry that would also consider the cultural and psychosocial aspects of the experience of mental disorder. However, when it came to proposing alternatives, he could only indicate the directions in which progress could be made, without going so far as to develop them.

R. D. Laing’s theory of madness

Laing believed that there is no categorical boundary separating sanity from madness. This principle was opposed to the psychiatric practice of the time , which until well into the 20th century consisted in part of cramming patients into psychiatric centers with few resources; basically, they tried to isolate people with mental disorders from the rest of the population, a way of hiding a social problem, while medicating them to simply treat problems that were understood to be individual rather than collective.

On the other hand, this idea according to which madness and normality are part of the same spectrum matched well with the theoretical proposal of psychoanalysis . However, the current initiated by Sigmund Freud also presented ideas that in the eyes of the defenders of anti-psychiatry are limiting, since it establishes a strong determinism in which the environmental influence of the past conditions us and practically forces us to protect our consciousness from thoughts and memories that can cause our entire mental life to enter into strong crises periodically.

Thus, R. D. Laing’s theory of the limits of madness was different from both hegemonic psychiatry and psychoanalysis.

Against the stigmatization of the disease

Laing noted that while mental illness has always generated stigma, the way psychiatry treats patients can also fuel and perpetuate such depersonalization and disregard.

For this psychiatrist, for example, schizophrenia, being the serious mental illness that we all know, is not so much an internal problem of the person as or an understandable reaction to facts that cannot be accepted , which are too disturbing. Thus, in order to know the disorder well, it is necessary to know the cultural filter through which the person experiences his life.

In other words, according to Laing’s theory, mental disorder is nothing more than an expression of distress, something linked to one’s own experiences and not to failures that can only be explained by examining the brain. That is why it is necessary to study the social and cultural dynamics, the way in which the environment affects the person.

Laing’s ideas lead one to think that psychosis is, in fact, the attempts to express oneself of the person with schizophrenic-type disorders, and that therefore they are not in themselves something bad, something that deserves the exclusion of that person by the rest of society.

Non-drug psychotherapy

Since for R. D. Laing the disorder does not have an original cause in the brain, but rather in the interaction, it does not make sense to base therapeutic interventions on medication and the use of psychotropic drugs. This was a widespread idea among anti-psychiatric advocates, and he defended it vehemently. As a substitute, Laing tried to make initiatives to understand the symbolisms that are expressed through the symptoms of mental disorder.

This approach was controversial, since would mean leaving many patients without relief in exchange for postponing their solution until the internal logic of their problem was understood.

On the other hand, Laing’s ideas continue to be seriously questioned today, as there is no evidence that mental disorders have causes that operate in a symbolic way. However, the pressure he and his anti-psychiatric colleagues exerted to improve patients’ living conditions did bear fruit, and psychiatry now treats these people much better.