"Just plain nuts"*

Mind Hacks: The chaos of R.D. Laing

Maybe I take a little too much pleasure from stories of the chaotic private lives of the famous; but this is a very good example of a physician who failed to heal himself.

He's been dead for some time now, but RD Laing was the 1960's era psychiatrist/author who promoted the idea that a mental illness was largely was a reaction to family dynamics. As Wikipedia says, Laing's views:

"...ran counter to the psychiatric orthodoxy of the day by taking the expressed feelings of the individual patient or client as valid descriptions of lived experience rather than simply as symptoms of some separate or underlying disorder....

Laing argued that the strange behavior and seemingly confused speech of people undergoing a psychotic episode were ultimately understandable as an attempt to communicate worries and concerns, often in situations where this was not possible or not permitted. Laing stressed the role of society, and particularly the family, in the development of "madness" (his term). He argued that individuals can often be put in impossible situations, where they are unable to conform to the conflicting expectations of their peers, leading to a "lose-lose situation" and immense mental distress for the individuals concerned."

Unfortunately, encouraging a belief in a full blown schizophrenic that their madness really has been caused by their family, or society at large, is rarely a helpful approach. So he has rather fallen out of favour now, at least for serious cases of madness, but you can see how appealing he would be to 1960's counterculture.

Anyhow, it turns out that his own family life was pretty much a shambles. The above link has a short outline of the story, but the full details are were in the lengthier Sunday Times article last weekend. Here's the summary:

He abandoned his first five children and left them in penury. He went on to father five more children with three different women, had innumerable affairs, was subject to violent drunken rages and became obsessed with his own fame. Yet he treated patients with extraordinary compassion and empathy, qualities he denied his own family.

Of course, he could blame his own family:

...his mother was over-protective, cold, and viewed overt displays of affection, particularly with her husband, as distasteful. Ronnie would later claim his mother made effigies of him into which she stuck pins, but none of his children believed it. It was, however, certainly true that he was not allowed to bathe on his own until he was 15.

Wikipedia puts it this way:

His parents led a life of extreme denial, exhibiting bizarre behaviour. His father David, an electrical engineer, seems often to have come to blows with his own brother, and himself had a breakdown when Laing was a teenager. His mother Amelia was described as "still more psychologically peculiar". According to one friend and neighbour, "everyone in the street knew she was mad".^[5]

Following his divorce, he was involved in this very 60's experiment, amusing described in the Times article:

The idea was that patients and doctors would live together, thus breaking down the barriers between them.

A “community house” was established at Kingsley Hall, a former youth hostel in east London. Sally Vincent was unimpressed. “It seemed to me that the psychiatrists outnumbered the patients, who were all female and uniformly good-looking. Ronnie would be pompousing about dressed in white robes looking like Jesus and I’d be asking him, ‘Why has that bloke got his hands all over that girl?’ The whole thing stank.”

The Times article gives examples of a lot worse behaviour as he aged.

The interesting point is, of course, that even if he could see the source of his inner demons in his unusual upbringing, why could he not use such knowledge to become a nicer person?

* famous Gary Larson cartoon may be viewed here.