His divided self: the legacy of controversial Glasgow psychiatrist RD Laing

Few could argue RD Laing’s life wasn’t fascinating. The long-haired, Paisley pattern-shirted doctor who once sold more than 400,000 copies of The Divided Self – a 1960 handbook which detailed forms of insanity and treatments – was one of the most contended characters psychiatry has ever produced.

Laing built a career on decrying traditional psychiatric techniques such as electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), lobotomy, and the use of chemical suppressants to treat schizophrenia. Yet parts of his life involved rampant excess, outbreaks of violence and alcohol and drug abuse.

He maintained that schizophrenia and mental illness didn’t stem from the individual; it was society itself which was sick, and fractured family units played a major part in facilitating mental illness.

Yet Laing would go on to father 10 children from two marriages and miscellaneous partners.

And while a basic tenet of his mental health doctrine connected family harmony to calm mindfulness, he didn’t always practise what he preached. Laing left his first family of five children to be brought up in penury in 1960s Glasgow despite being an international celebrity and a lecture circuit legend, with devotees said to include the Beatles and Van Morrison. He also subjected some of his children to violent outbursts.

The dichotomies raged through the controversial psychiatrist’s life like the blood flow to his amphetamined brain. Laing argued fiercely against psychiatry’s use of chemical mind controls and sedatives, yet

he took LSD (which was legal at the time) with clients such as Sean Connery, at the height of his Goldfinger fame, prescribing it medically to “expand their minds” and help Connery deal with the unwanted pressures associated with celebrity.

Laing, who attended Hutcheson's Grammar school and Glasgow University, began his career in the British Army Psychiatric Unit, where he railed against the use of insulin coma therapy and electric shock treatment on mentally ill soldiers, before becoming the country's youngest consultant at the Glasgow Royal Mental Hospital, then spending 10 years working at the Tavistock Institute in London.

By all accounts, Laing could be as unattractive as he was charismatic. So how difficult was it, to bring his story to the screen, I ask Mad To Be Normal's writer/director Robert Mullan.

“It was a Sisyphean task," replies Mullan, who has written books about Laing. "But I liked Ronnie. And I was attracted to his world. There was some mental illness in my own family, which prompted me to study psychology and when I went to university, it was all about rats-in-cages types of treatments. RD Laing argues against this and for this he was seen as the anti-Christ by the Establishment. Yet, this was what attracted me to him. He was radical. And I agreed with his argument about what is a ‘normal’ man, that someone who can go off and kill people in the name of war can in fact be more dangerous than a so-called lunatic who simply shouts at the world.”

RD Laing helped realign society’s view on madness. “Madness need not be all breakdown,” he wrote. “It may also be breakthrough. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.”

Robert Mullan’s fascination with Laing grew after they met during the 1980s, and the writer published a series of interviews, going on to make a documentary about the Scot.

“He was one of the best-read men I’ve ever met. We’d talk politics, Scottish Presbyterianism, existentialist writers such as Sartre. Ronnie had a great intelligence and great humour.”

Laing could play classical music and once claimed to be “the only man to speak Ancient Greek with a Glasgow accent”. Robert Mullan adds, “Ronnie had given up the drink at this time I spent with him in Austria. And if he had an espresso he would be in a good mood.”

Mullan came to understand the complexities of his character, the inconsistencies with his insistence family life should be sacrosanct, despite the fact he’d walked away from his own. Mullan presents Laing’s argument via David Tennant in the film: “I never left my kids. I left their mother.”

During his interviews, Mullan explored Laing’s relationship with his own parents, growing up in Glasgow’s Govanhill. Laing’s father was an electrical engineer and a gifted musician who’d had a nervous breakdown. Laing’s mother, meanwhile, seems to have been loath to parent her only child. “His mother used to wear a big baggy coat when she was pregnant because she didn’t want people to know she’d had sex,” says Mullan.

This was a woman who burned five-year-old Ronald’s wooden horse, declaring it was time to grow up. (At the same age his parents killed off Santa Claus.) This was a woman who Laing claimed later in life made a voodoo doll of him and stuck pins in it, hoping for a heart attack. (Her son did, in fact, die of a heart attack in 1989.)

Yet, while RD Laing’s treatment by his mother was unforgivable, he treated his own children with unimaginable dispassionateness, given that he purported to understand the roots of depression and mental breakdown. When his daughter Susie was dying from cancer, aged 20, in 1975 he insisted on telling her how long she had to live, against the express wishes of his ex-wife, Anne. (Anne would later describe Ronnie Laing as “The square root of nothing”.)

When his daughter Fiona had a nervous breakdown, Laing didn’t want to know. His son Adrian revealed his own thoughts in his biography of his father. “Being the son of RD Laing was neither amazing or enlightening,” wrote the London lawyer. “For most of the time it was a crock of s***.”

“His children had a wide view of their dad," says Mullan, of Adrian's comment. "Ronnie changed as he got older.” His relationship with his children certainly improved as he aged. “But it’s a miracle he survived his own childhood.”

“I always wanted to write a screenplay," adds Mullan, "and to be honest I was a bit tired of everyone slagging off RD Laing. Conventional psychiatry saw him as a maverick or a dangerous man. I wanted to resurrect his reputation and highlight the positive things in his life.”

When Mullan's film was first mooted nine years ago, Robert Carlyle was in the frame to play Laing, but then funding hopes faded and when the money returned, the central character was regenerated in the form of David Tennant.

Mad To Be Normal however doesn’t cover the wide span of RD Laing’s life. It focuses on his time in Kingsley Hall in London in 1965, part of a project he developed following on from his experiences in Glasgow’s Gartnavel Hospital where he’d developed the "Rumpus Room", an area where schizophrenic patients could let loose.

The London experiment allowed Laing to develop his progressive ideas for dealing with mental illness. “Madness in a patient is the result of the devastation wreaked upon them by us,” said the psychiatrist, who argued that tranquillisers prevent communication, that politics and negative socialisation play a huge part in crumbling minds.

His approach was to talk to patients; try and enter their minds; gain trust. Demarcation lines between patient and doctor were broken down, or certainly blurred. “Sometimes doctors need to be helped,” said Laing, perhaps unwittingly revealing a sliver of introspection.

There’s no doubt Laing’s disciples believed he achieved some startling results in bringing comfort to the mentally ill, one famous example being the case of painter Mary Barnes, who successfully emerged from schizophrenia.

Mad To Be Normal reveals an example of Laing at work at another hospital when he takes to a padded cell with a naked patient, removes his own clothes and mimics the woman's rocking motion in a display of empathy that succeeds in encouraging the silent patient to speak.

Often his techniques produced a short-term result. Sometimes they didn’t. But all the time, Laing appeared on chat shows, on student campuses where he was adored, on the lecture circuit where he coined it in. (He would later embark upon a hugely lucrative "re-birthing" programme, in which he took clients "back to the womb".)

Yet, while RD Laing gave so much of his time to his patients, Ronnie Laing stood accused of giving little to those closest to him. When drunk, which was often, he could start a fight in an empty house.

In the film, Laing’s central relationship is with an American student called Angie (played by Mad Men star Elisabeth Moss). Yet Laing didn’t have a partner called Angie. Was this fictional character created because the writer feared evoking the wrath of Laing’s former partners and families?

“I couldn’t possibly comment,” says Mullan, with a wry smile.

“Look," he adds, "I could have written a bleak, dark film about Ronnie’s life but it would never have been financed or seen.

That’s not to say he wasn’t a man of flesh and complicated. But remember, he was divorced and a single man. What I’ve always tried to do is my best for him. I wanted to focus on that positive part of his life.”

To transfer RD Laing and Ronnie Laing – not always the same person – onto the screen was a real challenge for the director. Laing could be hugely charismatic and compelling. He could be warm and empathic, but cold and aggressive. On top of that, the chain-smoking, sometimes sneering “acid Marxist” spoke with a slow, deliberate drawl, which doesn’t translate into film energy.

“That’s true,” says the writer. “But David wasn’t out to do an impersonation. And he does an incredible job getting across the passion of the man.”

How important was it he got the film out first? Adrian Laing has been trying to produce a film based on his own biography of his father for years.

“I really don’t know about that,” says Mullan. “I just hope this film is well received.”

The interest will be enormous. RD Laing’s story has already been created in theatre several times in the likes of Patrick Marmion’s play The Divided Laing, starring Brian Cox’s son Alan. There have been more books written about RD Laing than Laing wrote himself.

But Laing’s tale is compelling partly because it is tragic. The man who wore white robes during his Kingsley Hall period was said by a former lover to have had a Jesus complex. He had somehow created an alternative family collective, perhaps in retribution for his own, cruel family life.

Laing certainly wasn’t able to hold his own life together. Although RD Laing’s books regularly topped the student bestseller lists in the US and he shared the same stage as bands like the Grateful Dead, the General Medical Council (GMC) continually attacked his methods. While Laing would administer LSD to patients, he disparaged the use of medical drugs, and promoted "self-healing". At least two people jumped off the roof of Kingsley Hall, which was closed in 1970.

Laing’s alcohol use increased and in 1987 he was forced to withdraw his name from the GMC after a patient accused him of drunkenness.

He took to holding re-birthing workshops, writing books of poetry, doing whatever he could to earn money. However, Robert Mullan says RD Laing’s legacy lives on. “He didn’t change my life, but he made me look at things differently. That’s why people like Van Morrison became interested parties.”

There’s no doubt RD Laing’s belief that the mentally ill should be treated as part of the community and not locked away in Gothic institutions has been widely accepted. But what will film fans make of the Scots psychiatrist who could reveal both great compassion and an ability to hurt others?

Mullan will hope RD Laing’s manner of death is an indicator. When the mental health maverick died aged 61 of a heart attack on a St Tropez tennis court in 1989, he was winning at the time. His work remains influential and Laing devotees would argue the nation's current dependence on prescription drugs suggests there was at least some method in his madness.

Mad To Be Normal is the closing gala of The Glasgow Film Theatre and screens at the GFT next Sunday (February 26) at 7.30pm. The red-carpet event will be attended by director Robert Mullan along with David Tennant and other cast members.

The Sunday Herald is the Glasgow Film Festival's media partner www.glasgowfilm.org/festival#gff17