anti-psychiatry
anti-psychiatry

A culture of madness?

In the 1960s and into the 1970s the psychotic individual increasingly became positioned both as ‘victim’ and ‘anti-hero’.  Psychiatrists such as Ronald Laing and his colleagues argued that schizophrenia was caused by dysfunctional (if not outright pathological) family relationships, in which the schizophrenic subject found themselves in an impossible, no-win …

Whither anti-psychiatry?

Back in those halcyon days of the late 1960s there were some unlikely heroes, who almost overnight seemed to rise into the stratosphere of celebrity (and cult) status.  One of these was Ronald Laing, a Scottish psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who had some ten years earlier written what must truly be …