‘Sean Connery came for some Scottish bonding’
As his story is brought to the big screen, the shocking legacy of the maverick Scot who revolutionised medicine
IN the Sixties heyday of flower power, one of the world’s most daring experiments in mental health was being conducted by a brilliant young Scottish doctor. Although many of the patients were being treated for psychosis and schizophrenia, there were no bars on the windows, no locks on the doors.
This was a refuge where patients and doctors lived communally and madness was explored freely. It was psychiatry’s answer to the hippy counterculture – the anti-asylum.
Amid the tumbledown surroundings of Kingsley Hall, a ramshackle former community building in London’s East End, fragile patients screamed like deranged children or gabbled nonsensically to their hearts’ content.
At the heart of this picture of apparent chaos stood the calming, confident presence of R.D. Laing, a once-obscure Glasgow psychiatrist whose eye-catching methods were to make him arguably the most celebrated expert in his field since Freud.
Rather than lock fractured minds up in padded cells or administer brutal electric shock treatment, Laing favoured a humane approach to mental illness and would often sit for hours either in silence or talking with patients in an effort to understand their pain. Rather than administer strong sedatives to dull their tortured thoughts, mind-altering LSD and marijuana were the drugs of choice.
It was an unconventional approach which divided medical opinion, but his teachings chimed with the era of ‘Swinging London’ and Vietnam, hippies and drugs, mysticism and astrology, pop and protest.
His methods transformed Laing into a cult hero admired by luminaries such as Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes and Harold Pinter, courted by pop stars like the Beatles and Jim Morrison.
His darkly handsome looks, effortless charm and ready wit helped him become an international celebrity, hailed as Britain’s answer to Timothy Leary for his advocacy of LSD. He became a regular fixture at A-list parties and a frequent talk show guest. He loved the adulation – at the height of his fame, 4,000 people turned out to see him deliver a lecture in Santa Monica, a week after Bob Dylan had pulled in the same number.
Yet, within five years of its opening, Kingsley Hall was shut down – an abject failure – and Laing’s star was fast burning itself out as his ground-breaking theories became overshadowed by a hedonistic lifestyle that led to alcoholism and his death at 61 in 1989.
As he headed to oblivion, his private life was unravelling. His lasting contribution to psychiatry may be to link mental distress to a dysfunctional family upbringing, but Laing’s own home life was the very definition of dysfunctional.
With two failed marriages and ten children by four different women, his relationships with his offspring were frequently strained and occasionally violent.
Now, half a century on, a major new biopic, Mad To Be Normal, is hoping to offer a reassessment of Laing’s life and work. The premiere of the movie, which stars David Tennant, will close this year’s Glasgow Film Festival next Sunday (February 26).
Tennant, raised like Laing in the Glasgow area, will attend the gala screening of the film, which also stars Sir Michael Gambon, Gabriel Byrne and Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss.
Festival co-director Allison Gardner described Tennant’s performance as ‘absolutely stunning’, adding: ‘It seems only fitting that Glasgow should have the honour of hosting the premiere of a film about one of the city’s most complex and charismatic figures.’
The film charts Laing’s life and work through the unique community he created at Kingsley Hall, where he treated 130 people in the five years up to its closure in 1970 using methods deemed irresponsible and unscientific by the psychiatric establishment, which regularly tried to prevent him from working.
Director Robert Mullen said: ‘R.D. Laing was seen as the “high priest of anti-psychiatry” and the so-called “Acid Marxist” – lauded by his sup- porters for his daring and experimental work with disturbed people. In truth, Laing simply tried harder than other psychiatrists to sympathetically understand the cracked minds of the people who came to see him.
‘He gave them time and tried to see the world from their point of view. His books sold all over the world and his reputation was global.’
It was quite an achievement for an only child from a repressed middle-class Presbyterian family in Glasgow’s Govanhill district.
He was born Ronald David Laing on October 7, 1927, at 21 Ardbeg Street, where a blue plaque now sits above the front door.
His preoccupation with the family may be rooted in his own emotionally austere upbringing. His father was an electrical engineer and a gifted musician (a talent young Ronnie inherited), his mother was overprotective, cold, and viewed overt displays of affection, particularly with her husband, as distasteful.
She would break her son’s favourite toys when he became too attached to them. He was five when his parents told him Santa Claus did not exist. He never forgave them.
A bright child, he won a scholarship to Hutchesons’ Grammar School and went on to study medicine at Glasgow University. He did his national service at the British Army Psychiatric Unit at Netley in Hampshire, where the treatment options largely comprised administering insulin comas, electric shocks or drugs.
Laing befriended a patient, spent hours with him in his padded cell and realised the man’s condition improved just by having someone talking to him. He believed that mental illness was a sane response to an insane world and that a psychiatrist had a duty to communicate empathetically with patients.
Later, on a tour of a Chicago hospital, when faced with a naked schizophrenic woman rocking silently to and fro in a padded cell, Laing took off his own clothes and sat next to her, rocking to the same rhythm until she spoke for the first time in months.
‘Did it never occur to you to do that?’ he asked stunned doctors afterwards.
His career was taking off as his early writings caught the zeitgeist. His first book, The Divided Self, written aged just 28, presented schizophrenia as a rational response to intolerable experiences. His follow-up, Sanity, Madness and the Family set out his most controversial idea: that family life plays an important part in the development of schizophrenia.
At Netley, he also began dating a nurse called Anne Hearne, who soon discovered she was pregnant. They married in October 1952 and their daughter, Fiona, was born in December. Two more daughters and two sons would follow. But for all his professional benevolence, Laing was a flawed parent.
In 1962, he was appointed clinical director of the prestigious Langham Clinic, in London, but was sacked three years later because of his increasing drug use.
The following year, his marriage broke up acrimoniously after years of vicious marital warfare. Laing was at the height of his celebrity at the time and earning considerable sums, but he told the lawyer handling his divorce that he wanted to pay no more than the ‘legal minimum’ to his former wife.
While Laing enjoyed the high life in London, Anne and the five children returned to Glasgow, where they shared a single room and washed in the public baths.
His son Adrian, now 58, and a media lawyer in London, started taking odd jobs at the age of 13 to contribute to the family income. ‘He adopted an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality,’ says Adrian. ‘In my mind, he confused liberalism with neglect.
‘My mother was furious about it. She had an unfathomable amount of resentment. Her expression for him was “the square root of nothing”.’
Meanwhile, Laing was well under way with his Kingsley Hall experiment, modelling the sprawling house on the original Greek sense of the word asylum as a refuge for the psychotic and the schizophrenic.
People were free to come and go as they pleased and there was a room, painted in eastern symbols, set aside for meditation. There were all-night therapy and role-reversal sessions, marathon Friday night dinners
hosted by Laing and visits from mystics, academics and celebrities, including, famously, Sean Connery, a friend and admirer of Laing.
The star allowed the psychiatrist to treat him for the stress he suffered while making the first James Bond films. In her autobiography, Connery’s first wife Diane Cilento claimed he was persuaded to experiment with LSD by Laing during the making of Goldfinger.
Former Kingsley Hall patient Francis Gillet recalled Laing and Connery’s close friendship, saying: ‘Sean Connery came to a Kingsley Hall party one night for some “Scottish bonding” in the form of a bout of Indian wrestling. Laing was shouting in the games room at him to “see which Scotsman was tougher – James Bond or Ronnie Laing”.’
Play was encouraged, as was regression through therapy to childhood, as Laing believed that all so-called madness was rooted in the traditional family structure.
The first resident, Mary Barnes, regressed to infancy for a time, smearing the walls with her faeces, squealing for attention and being fed with a bottle. She later became a renowned artist and poet. More controversially, several patients and workers were given high-grade LSD – still legal when Kingsley Hall opened – supposedly to release their inner demons or buried childhood traumas.
At least two people jumped off the roof of the building, leading to its eventual closure. Its reputation attracted drifters and dropouts and, on at least one occasion, the house was raided by the drug squad.
By the time Anne left him, Laing had started an affair with Jutta Werner, a German graphic designer who would become his second wife, and with whom he would have three children. But his behaviour was becoming erratic.
In a 1994 biography of his father, Adrian Laing recounts one of the psychiatrist’s rare visits to their new home in Glasgow when, having argued with Jutta, he took out his anger by beating his daughter, Karen.
In 1975, his second eldest child, Susan, was diagnosed with terminal monoblastic leukaemia, triggering a row between her parents. Anne felt it would be kinder not to tell Susan the diagnosis. Laing disagreed and defied the wishes of Anne, Susan’s fiancé and her doctors, travelling to the hospital to inform her that, in all likelihood, she would not live beyond her 21st birthday.
‘Then, after he told Susie, he went back to London and left us to deal with it. My mother was spitting blood,’ said Adrian. His sister died, aged 21, in March 1976.
Laing’s own life was hurtling off course, partly due to his growing reliance on alcohol. His troubled marriage to Jutta ended in 1981 and he went on to have two more children by different women.
In 1986, one of his patients lodged a complaint with the General Medical Council, accusing Laing of being drunk and abusive during a consultation. The following year he was struck off the medical register.
He moved to America and then back to Europe. He was 61 and without a profession, a fixed address or funds when he collapsed and died on the tennis court in St Tropez on August 23, 1989.
By then, he had been reconciled with Adrian, who retains a healthy perspective on his father’s shortcomings.
‘When people ask me what it was like to be R.D. Laing’s son, I tell them it was a crock of s***,’ he once said. ‘It was ironic that my father became well-known as a family psychiatrist when, in the meantime, he had nothing to do with his own family.’
He was speaking in 2008 after the death of his half-brother, Adam, 41, whose decomposed body was found in a tent on the Balearic island of Formentera. R.D. Laing’s oldest son from his second marriage, Adam was found next to a discarded vodka bottle and an almost-empty bottle of wine.
It was feared he might have succumbed to the same vices that helped to kill his father. In the end, it emerged he had died of a heart attack, just like his flawed father.
Despite his failings, R.D. Laing remains required reading for students of psychiatry and psychotherapy around the world. More books have been written about him since his death than he ever wrote himself and The Divided Self has been continuously in print for nearly 50 years.
Adrian, who is working on his own film, says he plans to attend the premiere of Mad To Be Normal even though he regards it as ‘unofficial’ because the family was not consulted during its making.
He added: ‘We will reserve judgment about [it] until we have seen it. Our father’s professional reputation took many blows during his lifetime, so we will view [the film] with excitement tempered with a degree of trepidation as we do not know what is coming.
‘Despite all we went through, he was our dad and we love him dearly and are precious about his world-acknowledged humanistic legacy and his reputation.’
‘He had nothing to do with his own family’