Mental Patients’ Liberation
In 1961 Thomas Szasz’s book The Myth of Mental Illness was published. Szasz launched an intellectual revolution with his argument that the idea of mental illness is a myth. The mind is not a material entity; therefore, unlike the body or brain it cannot be diseased. Szasz’s book was written decades before the theory of biochemical brain disorders rose to favor and replaced the psychoanalytical theory that “mental illnesses” were caused by emotional traumas. (Despite the change in theory mental health professionals still use the term mental illness today; in fact it is enshrined in the diagnostic catalogue Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, or “DSM,” used by all mental health professionals, which classifies all emotional problems as “mental disorders.”) The sense of identity of psychiatrists hinges on the idea that they are medical specialists—with all the prestige doctors possess in modern society—engaged in a valiant and steadily advancing battle against the epidemic of mental illness. Szasz debunked this idea with his argument that “mental illnesses” were really just “problems of living”; furthermore his corollary was that psychiatric treatments were a form of scapegoating and social control aimed at those individuals who deviated from social norms.1
The psychiatric establishment was outraged at Szasz. The head psychiatrists of the Department of Medicine at the State University of New York Medical School, where Szasz taught, tried to silence him in the early 1960s. Supporters of the status quo in the mental health field wrote reams of articles attempting to refute him. Over the past half century Szasz continued to defend and expound his theories and to rebut his critics in over thirty books and countless articles. Szasz is not entirely alone: his work has inspired a handful of leading mavericks within the mental health field—including Peter Breggin—who have come to share his belief that mental illness is a myth or at least an inadequate paradigm.2
Without the books of Szasz there would have been no mental patients’ liberation movement. Szasz’s deconstruction of the concept of mental illness made it possible for “the mentally ill” who read him—or were aware of his ideas—to think of themselves in new terms and to resist the psychiatric definition of their identities: they were not persons with chronic “mentally diseased” minds, incapable of making rational decisions for themselves. Instead, they were free moral agents who were victims of a punitively paternalistic psychiatric establishment that denied their status as moral agents, which is the basis for full citizenship. The definition of a person as mentally ill is not a “medical diagnosis,” it is a “moral verdict”—as two of Szasz’s colleagues aptly put it.3 Diagnosis is, according to Szasz, the first step in the process of depriving persons who deviate from cultural norms of their constitutional right as citizens to liberty and subjecting them to involuntary psychiatric treatment.
Although Szasz’s work was the essential stepping stone that made possible a revolutionary redefinition of the so-called mentally ill, it stopped short from the perspective of recent developments; it did not provide a basis for Mad Pride, for a positive interpretation of madness. In fact, Szasz doesn’t believe in the existence of madness; he thinks the mad are pretending to be mad and they are acting in bad faith. Szasz wrote recently, “All mental illness is malingering (or may be said to be a kind of malingering).”4 Laing, on the other hand, believed what the psychiatrist calls “mental illness” is actually an emotional or spiritual crisis characterized by an altered state of consciousness. In the last few years Szasz has decided that madness is as much of a “myth” as is mental illness.
It was Laing, more than any other figure, whose writings provided a basis for the mad to affirm their madness, to assert it as a spiritual gift and to question the sanity of normal society. For one reason or another Laing’s works were virtually ignored by the mental patients’ liberation movement (except for a brief time in the early 1970s), and the psychiatric survivors’ movement remains steadfastly secular in orientation—ironically so, considering the fact that the overwhelming majority of former mental patients are unusually and intensely spiritual. Unlike Szasz, who was venerated by radical activists in the ex-mental patients’ movement, Laing’s work was rarely read by ex-patients and less rarely cited. I am not sure why this is the case; perhaps it was because Laing remained aloof from the patients’ activism. Perhaps it was because from the start, some of the leaders of the movement (e.g., Judi Chamberlin) were secular in orientation. Perhaps Laing’s theories seemed too “far-out” to people who were trying to demonstrate they were really rational just like “normal” people and thus deserved the same rights. Perhaps this was an inevitable product of the youthfulness of the movement. (I mean of the movement as a whole, not of the activists.)
A few years after The Myth of Mental Illness, Laing’s most controversial book, The Politics of Experience (1967), was published. Laing startled the world anew with the claim that the mad were mystics and that schizophrenics were saner than normal people, including psychiatrists. Here was a basis for Mad Pride. Laing even said that schizophrenia may be the result, not of a genetic flaw, but of a genetic asset. He explained, “Our society may itself have become biologically dysfunctional, and some forms of schizophrenic alienation from the alienation of our society may have a sociobiological function that we have not recognized.”5
He wrote, “The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.” Madness may be a way of healing “our appalling state of alienation called normality.”6
Psychiatrists were aghast. Many psychiatrists said that Laing himself was crazy. Rumors persisted for years—of no substance—that Laing had gone off the deep end and been locked up in a mental hospital. According to Laing’s critics, then and today, his ideas were unsound—irrational products of the feverish 1960s’ counterculture.7 In the 1970s the psychiatric establishment launched a massive campaign to discredit him; it was said that Laing was a kook who “romanticized” mental illness. It was implied that Laing believed that “schizophrenics” were happy as larks. This is nonsense, as a careful reading of Laing would demonstrate: the fact is, Laing was a mystic in the Romantic tradition who believed the mad were frequently “on to something,” but he had also worked for years as a therapist with the mad, and he did not view them—nor normal people—through rose-colored glasses. He knew the mad person—entering a new unfamiliar world—is often “completely lost and terrified.”8
Like Szasz, Laing believed that people labeled “mentally ill” were experiencing problems of living. But he parted company with Szasz where Szasz denied the existence of madness.*22 Laing believed that madness was an altered state of consciousness, madness was a “journey” in the inner world; psychotics were pioneer explorers of the inner world. He also argued in The Politics of Experience that madness was (often) a natural process of spiritual death and rebirth. These two complementary themes run throughout Laing’s book—madness as exploration of the inner world and madness as a process of death and rebirth.
It was Laing’s firm conviction that mad persons and madness should be taken seriously—not treated as specimens of mental disease. Laing wrote, “We respect the voyager, the explorer, the climber, the space man.” Why is it we do not respect the mad who are often exploring “the inner space and time of consciousness?”9
Normal people, Laing stated, are so out of touch with this realm that “many people now argue that it does not exist.”10 “Our time has been distinguished, more than by anything else, by a drive to control the external world . . . and by an almost total forgetfulness of the internal world.”11“The outer divorced from any illumination from the inner is in a state of darkness.”12 By “inner world” Laing means fantasies, dreams, spiritual experiences, and the experience of God.13 Laing regarded this denial of the spiritual inner realm as insanity—the form of insanity, alienation, that is most characteristic of the modern world, the normal world (see the introduction).
Laing is clear that the person labeled mentally ill may be creatively maladjusted. Laing illustrates this with an illuminating analogy. A plane may be out of formation but on course. “The whole formation may be off course.” “If the formation is itself off course, then the man who is ready to get ‘on course’ must leave the formation” to do so.14 The person who is out of formation may be “mentally ill”—socially devalued in the eyes of others and Psychiatry—but she may be trying to find the way to get on course.
Many of the mad were pioneers venturing into unknown or forgotten realms. We should “learn to accord to so-called schizophrenics who have come back to us [from their voyage into inner space] . . . no less respect than the often no less lost explorers of the Renaissance.”15 We know Columbus was lost, Laing writes, yet we still admire him; after all, even though he was disoriented, he still stumbled on America.
Laing believed that madness was a potential death-rebirth experience. Madness constitutes a descent into the primordial chaos of the inner world, which makes possible a reconstruction of the self. If this experience was not aborted by psychiatry the mad person might be spiritually reborn as a mystic or a prophet; she might transcend normality and attain a new self attuned to God, to the cosmos, a self that was truly sane. As Laing eloquently wrote, “True sanity entails the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self completely adjusted to our alienated social reality . . . and through this death a rebirth . . . and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer.”16
Throughout Laing’s life (and after his untimely death in 1989) the psychiatric establishment ridiculed his theories, refused to acknowledge the value of madness, and continued to insist that the mad were “mentally ill,” and thus treated them with disdain and pity, often disguised as compassion. In 1987, looking back on his career, Laing said he was “disheartened” by the fact that his writings were continuously misinterpreted and that he had had so little effect on changing the system despite his celebrity in the 1960s and 1970s. It was as if, after all his explanations and clarifications, his message had fallen largely on deaf ears.*23, 17
Laing’s critics say he “romanticized” the mad. They don’t understand that Laing was a Romantic who believed that the experience of madness had spiritual value and that people in normal society must reconnect with our own inner worlds in order to overcome the alienation that is driving us out of our minds. Laing believed that madness could be the path back to sanity—not normality, but true sanity, a higher sanity. But his work raised a vexing question for those who are critics of society; if the person becomes sane, how can she tolerate living in an insane society? Laing never addressed this question. He did not know how we could change society or if we could.†24
Psychiatry does not have this problem of how to help the awakened person to live in this society. Its goal is to adjust the person troubled by the insanity of the world to the normal world at all costs. Better to drug him back to sleep. How could it be otherwise? Psychiatry is part of this normal world—even more so today than when Laing wrote (prior to the takeover of Psychiatry by the pharmaceutical companies). If the adult—or child or teenager—becomes maladjusted despite her education for normality, then the task of the psychiatrist, like that of the educator, is to use his tools (from drugs to indoctrination to electroshock) to help the deviant readjust to normal society and return to her state of obliviousness to the horrors of the world.
Despite the lacunae in his work, Laing’s perspective provides a philosophical basis for Mad Pride. It buttresses the idea expressed in DuBrul’s writings (see chapter 9) that the personality traits that predispose one toward having mad experiences give rise to mystical and transpersonal experiences. The mad have spiritual proclivities—“dangerous gifts”—that reflect an unusual capacity for spiritual experience that should be developed and treated with “care.”
Laing’s analysis provides a basis for Mad Pride in another sense: normative standards of spiritual well-being (which include contributing to society and to saving life on Earth) need to be created, which are not based on normality. A paradigm for spiritual growth is required, which is based on the realization that normality is a condition of alienation, of insanity, that must be transcended if humanity is to survive, if humanity (in the words of The Icarus Project) is to “tap into the true potential that lies between brilliance and madness.” Mad Pride is based on the same premise as Laing’s books: helping the mad does not mean drugging and coaxing them into a state of “adjustment,” but rather appreciating the state of madness for what it is: an existential clearing in the jungle of our insane modern society that potentially leads into the realm of true sanity, which, in the world today, means a state of creative maladjustment.