R. D. Laing, John Weir Perry, and the Sanctuary for Visionaries
Laing’s ideas on madness were remarkably similar to those of psychiatrist John Weir Perry. Perry was a Jungian psychiatrist and a visionary. Perry did not have Laing’s penchant for provocative declarations, and thus he did not become a famous icon of the 1960s’ counterculture like Laing or a fierce warrior against Psychiatry like Szasz. Like Laing, Perry was convinced that madness—psychosis—is a natural process of spiritual renewal, of psychic reorganization, of spiritual death and rebirth. Perry argued the mad need understanding and sanctuary in order to successfully complete this process.
As the director of an alternative sanctuary for psychotics in the 1970s (called Diabasis) and a therapist who had worked with psychotics for decades, Perry had the evidence to back up his claim that madness was a renewal process. (Laing of course had set up an alternative asylum in London in the 1960s, but due to extraneous conditions the reports of its efficacy were mixed.)1 Perry and the staff at Diabasis helped successfully guide many psychotics through the inner “journey” of madness. At Diabasis, and at a kindred project—the Laingian-inspired Soteria House—the clients were placed on minimal or no psychiatric drugs, and as a result of this type of support they got better; they did not become chronic patients. Perry found that 85 percent of the clients at Diabasis resolved their “schizophrenic episodes” within two or three months (without medication) and “went on growing” after leaving Diabasis.2 They did not necessarily become normal, but they did become sane. Perry, quoting Theodore Roszak, described this attainment as a “higher sanity” based on “the knowledge of many realities,” not just the one “narrow reality” of normal life but also the realities of the inner world and of supernatural realms.3
In 1979 the funding of Diabasis was abruptly terminated. The principle on which Diabasis was based is anathema to psychiatry today—that madness, “psychosis,” is not an illness but a natural process that fosters the spiritual evolution of the individual. This principle was succinctly formulated in a short “message” written by Perry and given to every new resident at Diabasis upon admission: “This is not a disease, illness or psychopathology. It is a rich inner experience in a visionary state that may be turbulent and scary at times, sometimes nightmarish and sometimes sublime, yet that’s all tending to move toward a goal that is favorable for a better life. We’re here to help you with it.”4
The psychiatric establishment ended all funding for facilities based on alternative models in the 1980s.5 Psychiatrists were no longer going to support sanctuaries for psychotics that were based on the idea that madness was a growth crisis, and they were certainly not going to support residences where patients were not forced to take psychiatric drugs—no matter how much more effective they were than traditional psychiatric treatment.6 The days of experimentation were over.
The psychiatric establishment was now in effect saying to the kind of troubled young people whom Diabasis had helped, “If you want our help you must accept you are mentally ill, take your medication, and recognize that your ‘visions’ are hallucinations and symptoms of your mental illness.” Innovators like Perry were told that there was no place for them within the public mental health system.
But one of Perry’s legacies to the Mad Pride movement was his demonstration that sanctuaries for the mad are viable; they work. Patients from the sanctuaries would get better, even “weller than well” (to borrow a phrase attributed to psychiatrist Karl Menninger). There are, in fact, at least two ideas of Perry’s with which most Mad Pride activists agree. First, the experience of madness has value, and second, there should be sanctuaries for people undergoing madness. These sanctuaries, like Perry’s, are where madness—the “psychotic episode” as the psychiatric establishment calls it—is treated as a growth experience and where persons are not forcibly drugged.
Ashley McNamara, a writer, Mad Pride activist, and cofounder of The Icarus Project (see chapter 8), wrote that “we live in a society that does not provide any guidance when we’re flying or allow any crash space when we’re coming back down. . ., a society that will punish us by evicting or incarcerating us if we get too far from the one sanctioned reality: working life.”7 Mad Pride activists like McNamara are encouraging the mad to establish their own self-help groups—to provide guidance and “crash space” for each other. But, of course, they realize that their task is difficult without social and financial support. Nevertheless, successful Mad Pride self-help groups and communities are proliferating all over the world8 as it becomes clear that Psychiatry is the problem, not the solution.
Perry and Laing both believed that the psychotic episode is not a disease; to the contrary it is a healing or growth process. Laing and Perry believed that psychiatric practices result in aborting the regenerative process and, further, that psychiatric practices induct the patients into “careers” as chronic mental patients.9 Why does this breakdown/ breakthrough process happen to some people and not to others? For most of his career, Perry theorized that the prepsychotic ego was more impaired, more “pathological,” than that of the normal person, and because of this pathology the unconscious attempts to heal the ego by bringing about the regenerative process of psychosis. By the 1990s Perry had revised his theory; now he believes that the self of the “schizophrenic” was not more impaired but more sensitive; her greater “sensitivity” to the pain of others made her more likely to become imbalanced and to undergo a breakdown/breakthrough, to experience the regenerative process of madness.*25, 10, 11
Laing also went through a trajectory similar to that of Perry. At first he thought the self of the mad person was more seriously impaired than that of the normal person and thus in greater need of healing,12 but by the time he wrote The Politics of Experience he had come, like Perry did later, to believe that the mad person was more sensitive. Further, the mad person typically had less of a capacity to tolerate the dishonesty and pretense that are endemic to modern life. It is extraordinary that these two psychiatrists had independently undergone a similar evolution in their views and that, furthermore, they both reached the conclusion that it was the mad person’s spiritual superiority in certain respects that made her more likely to be launched on a regenerative process (see the discussion in chapter 11).
Laing went further than Perry. Perry stopped just short of Laing’s assertion in The Politics of Experience that mad persons constituted a spiritual vanguard. Laing repeats this affirmation several times in The Politics of Experience (although in his subsequent work he abandoned the theme, as if he feared triggering another storm of controversy). Although I cited this passage earlier, it is worth repeating here. He wrote, “If the human race survives, future men will, I suspect, look back on our enlightened epoch as a veritable Age of Darkness. . . . The laugh’s on us. They will see that what we call ‘schizophrenia’ was one of the forms in which, often through quite ordinary people, the light began to break in the cracks in our all-too-closed minds.”13
The implication was of course that this process could be of value to everyone and that the mad were charting a way forward that we must follow (though hopefully with less pain and confusion) if we are to overcome the alienation that has driven us to kill each other (under the “legal” guise of war) and to destroy the Earth. (Laing lived in the days before global warming and ecocide, but the cold war created an omnipresent threat of mutual nuclear annihilation.)
In Laing as in Perry we find the same two ideas with which most Mad Pride activists, as stated above, would agree. First, the experience of madness has value, and second, there should be sanctuaries for people undergoing madness, sanctuaries where madness—the “psychotic episode” as the psychiatric establishment calls it—is treated as a growth experience and where persons are not forcibly drugged. (These two ideas were convictions that Laing held his entire life; in fact, not only had he run an alternative sanctuary for several years, but he spent his whole life trying—with little success—to get funding to create and maintain other sanctuaries for the mad.14)
As cited earlier, Joseph Campbell came up with an apt metaphor and analogy—inspired by the work of Perry, with whom he became friends. He wrote that the mad person and the mystic are all in the same ocean, the same “beatific ocean deep,” but the mystic and the saint are swimming, while the mad person is drowning.*26, 15 The reason for the difference, as Campbell saw it, is that mystics (or those who become mystics) are prepared for the ocean; they have usually been raised in or studied a spiritual tradition (whether it be Buddhism or Hinduism or Christianity). They know about the ocean before they venture into it, while mad persons (those who become “psychotic”) have no preparation or guidance; in most cases they are not even aware of the ocean’s existence until they find themselves immersed in it.
But more and more mad people are learning how to swim in this ocean—the ocean of the “inner world.” Psychiatrists try to drag them out, drug them up, and warn them never to go near the water; then they tell them they are incurably mentally ill. “What do we do with our visionaries?” Perry asked in dismay. “When the divine madness takes over them to the point of distress . . . we pull them out of it with isolation and medication to squelch by every means this process.”16
By creating self-help alternatives to Psychiatry, Mad Pride will provide an environment in which the mad can learn to swim. Mad Pride affirms that madness is an “extreme” state, not a state of pathology; it is not a pathological aberration from the natural order, from the benevolent guardianship of nature. It is natural—not pathological—to be maladjusted to this society, Laing asserted. The fact that the mad are maladjusted to society does not mean they are maladjusted to nature, or to the underlying basis of the cosmos.
Mad Pride wants to give the mad the freedom to be themselves, to be maladjusted to an insane world. Many Mad Pride activists feel better merely by working with others to change society; this in itself often enables them to attain a state of creative maladjustment. For many mad people, adjustment to the status quo may not be feasible. It may well be that the only way they can achieve a state of emotional equilibrium is to become the prophets, activists, and spiritual leaders who will endeavor to bring the world closer to the visions they have had and to attempt to help humanity to make the transition to a higher stage of consciousness beyond the status quo.