The theory of the limits of madness by R. d. Laing

Psychiatry has not always been a controversial field of work, but what is clear is that it has always had a direct effect on the lives of many people. That is why, especially in the first half of the 20th century, it began to question energetically the way in which health institutions managed the treatment given to people with disorders mental.

One of the representatives of this current of claims was Ronald David Laing, a controversial Scottish psychiatrist that he dedicated a good part of his life to questioning the limits of psychiatry and of madness as a concept.

• Related article: "Antipsychiatry: history and concepts of this movement"

who was r d. Laing? Short biography

R. d. Laing was born in Glasgow in 1927. He studied medicine in the same city and later worked as a psychiatrist in the British Army, where he became interested in researching the role of stress in mental health.

In the year 1965. R. d. Laing opened the Philadelphia Association, an institution that offers training to mental health professionals and, at the same time, treatment to patients. In addition, he opened a project in which therapists and patients lived together.

The goal Laing set for himself was to push psychiatry to take a much more humanist in which the cultural and psychosocial aspects of the experience of the disorder are also considered mental. However, when proposing alternatives, he could only indicate the directions in which progress could be made, without actually developing them.

The theory of madness by R. d. Laing

Laing believed that there is no hard line separating sanity from insanity. This principle was opposed to the psychiatric practice of the time., which until well into the 20th century consisted in part of overcrowding patients in psychiatric centers with few means; Fundamentally, the attempt was made to isolate people with mental disorders from the rest of the population, a way of hiding a social problem, while they were medicated to simply treat problems that were understood to be individual and not collective.

On the other hand, this idea according to which madness and normality are part of the same spectrum matched well with the theoretical proposal of psychoanalysis. However, the current initiated by Sigmund Freud He also presented ideas that in the eyes of the defenders of antipsychiatry are limiting, since it establishes a strong determinism in which the environmental influence of the past conditions and practically forces us to protect our consciousness from thoughts and memories that can cause our entire mental life to enter into strong crises in a way periodic.

Thus, the theory of the limits of madness of R. d. Laing was different from both hegemonic psychiatry and psychoanalysis.

Against the stigmatization of the disease

Laing noted that while mental illness has always carried stigma, the way in which mental illness psychiatry treats patients can also feed and perpetuate that depersonalization and disparagement.

For this psychiatrist, for example, the schizophrenia, being the serious mental illness that we all know, it is not so much an internal problem of the person as oran understandable reaction to facts that cannot be accepted, which are too disturbing. In this way, to know the disorder well, one must know the cultural filter through which the person experiences his or her life.

That is to say, according to Laing's theory, mental disorder is nothing more than an expression of anguish, something linked to one's own experiences and not failures that can only be explained by examining the brain. That is why it is necessary to study social and cultural dynamics, the way in which the environment affects the person.

Laing's ideas lead one to think that psychosis is actually attempts to express oneself of the person with schizophrenic disorders, and therefore are not in themselves something bad, something that deserves the exclusion of that person from the rest of society.

drug-free psychotherapy

As for R. d. Laing the disorder does not have an original cause in the brain, but in the interaction, it does not make sense to base therapeutic interventions on medication and the use of psychotropic drugs. This was a very widespread idea among the defenders of anti-psychiatry, and he defended it vehemently. As a substitute, Laing tried to make initiatives to understand the symbolisms that are expressed through the symptoms of mental disorder.

This approach was controversial, since would mean leaving many patients without relief in exchange for postponing their solution until the internal logic of his problem was understood.

On the other hand, Laing's ideas continue to be seriously questioned today, since there is no evidence that there are causes that operate symbolically in mental disorders. However, the pressure that both he and his colleagues in antipsychiatry exerted to improve the conditions of The lives of patients have borne fruit, and currently psychiatry provides much better treatment for these people.