Authors: Jenny Diski
It was incredibly seductive. The mad hero became a teacher, whose pronouncements were only for those who could or would understand.
The crazy were shamans, gurus, speakers in tongues, cut loose from ordinary language and behaviour, and were at risk, as are
all holy men and women, of persecution from being locked up and drugged into silence. They were the heirs to the witch hunts
conducted by the Inquisition. Society found the mad intolerable and psychically killed them if they refused to conform. They
spoke the peculiar language of truth, a kind of poetry, and acted out reality, inscrutable to those who refused to hear and
see. Laing and fellow psychotherapists David Cooper and Joseph Burke opened a house in East London, called Kingsley Hall,
where the shrinks and the mad lived communally and defied uninitiated visitors to tell which was which. It wasn’t that easy
to tell even for those who lived there. Mary Barnes was a famous resident: a former nurse who had had a catastrophic breakdown
in her mid-forties. In the basement of Kingsley Hall, she painted frantic pictures in swirling psychedelic colours, howled,
ranted, was reborn, nursed dolls at her breast, shat like a baby and rubbed it into the walls. Everything was permitted. Everything
expressed the message about reality she was trying to get across. It was a private healing process from which the ‘normal’
could benefit just by watching and reading about it.
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The Good Doctors were there not to control but to enable whatever needed to happen so that the mad could express themselves.
If a ‘patient’ took off her clothes during a session, Laing took off his too in order to show that he was on her wavelength.
Wavelength was everything, though I’m inclined to doubt now that the mad really wanted their doctors to be as mad as they
were. Laing and the other anti-psychiatrists provided hash, mescaline and LSD to open the channels to the truth, in much the
same spirit that a handful of other people, responding to similar spiritual and psychological teaching at the time, were trepanning
themselves – boring holes in their foreheads in order to let the light into their third eye.
And let me say, for all its excesses and cock-ups and carelessnesses, even the stupidities, the anti-psychiatry movement had
a point. Life for the institutionalised mad was grim. In the huge hospitals for the mad, left over from the Victorians, they
were drugged into silence and calamitous palsies, received electroshock therapy and lobotomies, well into the Sixties and
beyond. In spite of the worthy Quakers of the nineteenth century, care for the mad in large asylums was often brutal and punitive,
suffering from a lack of good training and money. What mental institutions did for many people was institutionalise them.
Going into the madhouse often trained the mad to want to remain incarcerated. It is not accidental that in Ken Kesey’s book
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
,
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the great revelatory moment is when the Clon-like hero, McMurphy, discovers that all his fellow victims are voluntary patients,
and not, like him, on a section. They could all leave if they wanted to.
I was certainly ready for anti-psychiatry. I had been in two psychiatric hospitals when I read
The Divided Self
, and was shortly to be in a third. I never suffered from brutality, but I saw its effects on staff and other patients. Geriatric
patients and those we would now call sufferers of Alzheimer’s disease were lumped in with psychiatric patients: they were
particularly hard to cope with and got roughly handled. When I objected at one woman, in her late forties with an early form
of dementia, who incessantly roamed round and round the day room, whimpering, being pushed into her chair, I was told to mind
my own business: ‘You’re just a patient.’ Mostly, I was on anti-depressants and saw a psychiatrist twice a week for fifteen
minutes (having seen the terrors of those who had ECT when I was fifteen, I always refused to have it), but in one hospital
I was put into ‘sleep therapy’ after it was decided I was particularly depressed, and when a nurse noticed several days later
that I was suffering from barbiturate poisoning as a result, and I became ‘difficult’ to deal with, wanting more of the lovely
oblivion I had been given, I was detained under a section of the Mental Health Act that deprived me of any right to agree
or disagree with my own treatment and the right to leave. I was detained, literally, being held down by several nurses and
injected with Largactyl, which put me into another narcosis, but this time with hideous nightmares I couldn’t wake up from.
Later, in the Maudsley, it was the ‘abreaction’ therapy and intravenous injections of methylamphetamine. A woman in the bed
next to me, incredibly in 1968, was put on the completely discredited insulin shock therapy, another given LSD ‘treatment’.
Two or three of the patients had received lobotomies, and sat passively waiting to be discharged. The strangest things were
going on. And all the time, in all the hospitals, I watched people come back from their twentieth, thirtieth, God knows how
many, electro-convulsive therapy session, pale, horrified and remembering nothing about themselves or where they were, but
weeping with fear as the next ECT became due. Psychiatrists I’ve talked to since, some of them working later at the Maudsley,
are amazed to hear about the treatment I saw and received, but the hospital was a teaching hospital and regarded itself as
being on the experimental edge.
Laing’s ideas came when the time was absolutely right for them. Politics was experience, experience was political. I saw people
not being healed, but kept quiet, being made more convenient, sometimes with the best will in the world, but always, it seemed
to me, with ears and eyes closed to what the distressed and the mad were actually experiencing. I read Laing’s books as if
they were a road map of my life. I wanted to be part of it (even though I was just a humble depressive and he was only really
interested in exciting schizophrenics). But when, as an outpatient at the Tavistock Clinic in the mid-Sixties, I said that
I wanted to go and work as a volunteer at Kingsley Hall, my psychiatrist responded (quite correctly, of course, it wouldn’t
have been very good for my own mental health), ‘If you try, I’ll have you sectioned.’ The threat to lock up and give enforced
treatment to wilful patients was always readily available in the psychiatrist’s medical bag and a gift to any anti-authoritarian
patient or theoretician.
Laing fused the notion of liberation of the insane with the buzz that was already beginning to be heard about the liberation
of the mind in a broader sense, and it was thrillingly cogent. At least in theory. Laing was a brilliant theoretician; but
as a practitioner, Dr Ronnie’s patients were often dumped back into institutions or left to cope for themselves when they
became too hard even for him to handle. He called in the men in white coats and walked away more than once to my knowledge.
Drugs, drink, general craziness and a phenomenal amount of ego mixed with the theory and made some dangerous black holes in
the practice.
Even aside from Laing’s own limitations, there was the matter of pain. While we romanticised madness, he and those of us who
supported him failed to take seriously the excruciating pain of the mad. Pain was existential truth, so the anti-psychiatrists
permitted them to go through it; indeed, insisted that they did. In fact, as anyone stuck in the middle of a severe depression
or a terrifying psychotic episode would have told their champions if they’d really been listening, people suffering from severe
mental illness would do anything to make the anguish stop. Most of those having ECT, lobotomies, and mind-numbing drugs were
voluntary patients, as McMurphy found out, prepared to have whatever treatment it would take to stop the nightmare. The anti-psychiatrists
took other people’s pain too philosophically. Nevertheless, for all that, read those early books by Laing and Esterson, even
parts of Laing’s later increasingly gnomic, not to say crazy, or faux-crazy writings, and see if they aren’t still powerful,
intelligent and compelling.
In just the same way as it happened with politics and education, liberation got confused with libertarianism. And in the area
of psychiatry, too, Thatcher and Reagan in the Eighties took up our slack thinking, to transform the rhetoric and turn it
into their own special form of radicalism, all the while blaming the chaos caused by the permissiveness of the Sixties for
their harsh ‘necessities’. We were guilty of woolly-mindedness: and as in politics and education, the upshot of libertarianism
was there to be seen at the time. We didn’t see it, or if we did, we didn’t think about it enough. Thomas Szasz’s book
The Myth of Mental Illness
,
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was read as another book, along with those of Laing and friends, that promoted anti-psychiatry and the freeing of the mad
from the shackles of the medicating doctors. It was, in its way. At least in theory. Mental illness was a category of control
by institutions of the individual. Shut down the mental hospitals, free the madmen, they were no more mad than you and me,
said Szasz. It looked on a not-careful-enough reading just like the liberating theses of the Good Doctors. How carefully did
we read the passages where he said that if the so-called mad behaviour of those pushed out on to the streets was causing civil
difficulties, it was simple misbehaviour, and should be treated as such: delinquents should be locked up in prisons, dealt
with by courts? And perhaps it wasn’t actually so far from Laing’s position, certainly not so far from his practice. But it’s
easy to see now that this view (and perhaps, indeed, the Good Doctors’ views) could sit happily to the far right of the political
spectrum. Szasz wanted to get rid of the ‘namby-pamby caring’ that was precisely what us namby-pamby carers in the Sixties
were wanting to achieve more of. We were (those of us not aligned to strict Marxist or Trotskyist groups who took more care
in analysing what they were reading) profoundly naïve, the wishy-washy liberals, the wets, so sneered at by the Thatcher government.
Thomas Szasz wanted no kind of doctoring at all of the mind. Let people be free to roam the streets and cause trouble, and
let those who didn’t like it deal with them as individual nuisances. There was no such distinction as bad or mad. The State
had no business interfering with matters of the mind, or even supposing that Mind existed. Along with the behaviourist psychologists,
like B. F. Skinner and John B. Watson, Szasz’s point was to reject the notion that mind had any meaning at all. He didn’t
want to help the mad or listen to them, or offer them asylum; he wanted to abolish the idea of them. He refuted the concept
of madness in order to refute any claim for civic responsibility towards others. Close the hospitals, let the mad walk free.
Everyone made their own individual choices: the rich, the poor, the mad, the sane. That was their problem. Charles Shaar Murray
assessed it correctly when in 1988, after the libertarian Right had done its worst, he noted:
The line from hippy to yuppie is not nearly as convoluted as people like to believe and a lot of the old hippie rhetoric could
well be co-opted now by the pseudo-libertarian Right – which has in fact happened. Get the government off our backs, let individuals
do what they want – that translates very smoothly into laissez-faire yuppyism, and that’s the legacy of the era.
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The argument limps on, between generations now, about the legacy of the permissive Sixties. There are two accusations: that
we caused the greed and self-interest of the Eighties by invoking the self, the individual, as the unit of society and setting
up individualism for the Right to pick up and run with; or that we caused it by being so permissive, so soppy about matters
that needed hard, firm handling, that a reaction was inevitable if the West wasn’t to sink into a morass of self-indulgent
chaos. But, we cry, that wasn’t what we meant. And it wasn’t. We had hardly invented the idea of Self, nor the idea that the
individual had a right to respect and equality. Nor is it, anathema though it might be to the communitarian Left, such a terrible
notion so long as the bad guys don’t get hold of it. We were, and some of us still are, namby-pamby. We certainly believed
very definitely that there was such a thing as society, and that attending to its most vulnerable members was one of its main
tasks. But we were guilty, I think, of not imagining the Eighties, of not being able to visualise what David Widgery calls
Thatcher’s ‘appalling candour’
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in denouncing society as a myth, and the greed and self-interest (not the same thing as an interest in the self) that could
be and was unleashed in the name of sacred individualism. We didn’t really believe in the existence of the bad guys. We were
guilty, too, of failing to understand the power of capitalism, the pull of material well-being, because many of us had had
it much of our lives and could therefore easily enough imagine something different. We thought we would be happy to share
our goods and our relationships. Mostly, we weren’t, but even if we had been, the promise of wealth for all, of owning property
rather than having housing provided by councils at fair rents, was too desirable for those that had been left out of ownership.
And most people didn’t have either the time or the inclination to devote themselves to listening for the underlying sense
the mad might be making. They didn’t want lives that included allowing individuals all the time in the world they needed to
regress, to paint and to smear the walls with shit. They weren’t interested in the mental travellers coming back with remarkable
tales to tell; they wanted, as people seem always to want, to get on, and getting on meant focusing narrowly on the vital
business of getting things (money, success, objects) and not worrying too much about those who didn’t, unless they needed
sequestering. Truth (whatever it may be), art (whatever that may be), consideration at a cost to yourself, none of those were
priorities compared to a decent standard of living and the promise of ever better, ever more to come.