R. D. Laing  

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Ronald David Laing (7 October 1927 – 23 August 1989), usually cited as R. D. Laing, was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote extensively on mental illness - in particular, the experience of psychosis. Laing's views on the causes and treatment of psychopathological phenomena were influenced by his study of existential philosophy and ran counter to the chemical and electroshock methods that had become psychiatric orthodoxy. Taking the expressed feelings of the individual patient or client as valid descriptions of lived experience rather than simply as symptoms of mental illness, Laing regarded schizophrenia as a theory not a fact. Though associated in the public mind with anti-psychiatry he rejected the label. Politically, he was regarded as a thinker of the New Left.

Laing was portrayed by David Tennant in the 2017 film Mad to Be Normal.

See also

• Joseph Berke - psychoanalyst and therapist to Mary Barnes
• Existential therapy
• Family nexus
• Kraepelin’s enigmatic dream speech - analogous to psychotic speech
• Alice Miller
• Eugène Minkowski - a psychiatrist commended by Laing
• Martti Olavi Siirala
• David Smail - a more modern writer with similarly unconventional views
• Stephen Ticktin
• The Trap - a three-part BBC series which, in its first episode, concentrates on Laing’s work
• Emmy van Deurzen