History of Psychiatry

psychiatrist, and his books sold in millions and were translated into more than 20 languages. As we approach Laing in the 1990s, there are still deeply divided opinions as to his worth. One view, mainly held by psychiatrists, is that he enjoyed a fashionable notoriety in the 1960s when peddling anti-establishment opinions, but that his views on schizophrenia were dangerous nonsense, which encouraged patients to stop their medication, and which created the impres sion that the family was somehow to blame for the condition. The recent triumphal march of biological psychiatry, with its emphasis on genetics and physical treatment, is seen as rendering his writing largely irrelevant. In tandem, the spec tacular alcohol and drug-fuelled decline of his later years is taken as confirmation that his work was the product of an unstable charlatan. The alternative view, mainly held by nonpsychiatrists, is that Laing championed the cause of the mentally ill. In opposition to the impersonal empire of orthodox psychiatry, with its drugs and electroconvulsive therapy, its large and forbidding mental hospitals, and its belief that the 'mad' were incomprehensible and in