<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_David_Laing#On_mental_illness>
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On mental illness
Laing argued that the strange behavior and seemingly confused speech of
people undergoing a psychotic episode were ultimately understandable as
an attempt to communicate worries and concerns, often in situations
where this was not possible or not permitted. Laing stressed the role of
society, and particularly the family, in the development of "madness"
(his term). He argued that individuals can often be put in impossible
situations, where they are unable to conform to the conflicting
expectations of their peers, leading to a "lose-lose situation" and
immense mental distress for the individuals concerned. (In 1956, in Palo
Alto, Gregory Bateson and his colleagues Paul Watzlawick, Donald
Jackson, and Jay Haley[16] articulated a related theory of schizophrenia
as stemming from double bind situations where a person receives
different or contradictory messages.) The perceived symptoms of
schizophrenia were therefore an expression of this distress, and should
be valued as a cathartic and trans-formative experience.
Psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers had previously pronounced, in
his work General Psychopathology, that many of the symptoms of mental
illness (and particularly of delusions) were "un-understandable", and
therefore were worthy of little consideration except as a sign of some
other underlying primary disorder. Laing saw psychopathology as being
seated not in biological or psychic organs – whereby environment is
relegated to playing at most only an accidental role as immediate
trigger of disease (the "stress diathasis model" of the nature and
causes of psychopathology) – but rather in the social cradle, the urban
home, which cultivates it, the very crucible in which selves are forged.
This re-evaluation of the locus of the disease process – and consequent
shift in forms of treatment – was in stark contrast to psychiatric
orthodoxy (in the broadest sense we have of ourselves as psychological
subjects and pathological selves). Laing was revolutionary in valuing
the content of psychotic behavior and speech as a valid expression of
distress, albeit wrapped in an enigmatic language of personal symbolism
which is meaningful only from within their situation. According to
Laing, if a therapist can better understand his or her patient, the
therapist can begin to make sense of the symbolism of the patient's
psychosis, and therefore start addressing the concerns which are the
root cause of the distress.
Laing expanded the view of the "double bind" hypothesis put forth by
Bateson and other anthropologists, and came up with a new concept to
describe the highly complex situation that unfolds in the process of
"going mad" - an "incompatible knot". Laing compared this to a situation
where your right hand can exist but your left hand cannot. In this
untenable position, something has got to give, and more often than not,
what gives is psychological stability; a self-destruction sequence is
set in motion.
Laing never denied the existence of mental illness, but viewed it in a
radically different light from his contemporaries. For Laing, mental
illness could be a trans-formative episode whereby the process of
undergoing mental distress was compared to a shamanic journey. The
traveler could return from the journey with (supposedly) important
insights, and may have become (in the views of Laing and his followers)
a wiser and more grounded person as a result. This was consistent with
the critique of the validity of "value judgements" prevalent in Western
society, which was common amongst academics in the 1960s and 1970s (for
example, the views of Michel Foucault).
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