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Introduction
For
more than fifteen years an experiment has been
carried out in London to show that people
diagnosed psychotic who might otherwise be in
mental hospital could live in household of
varying types with students, medical student,
therapists and various others. I lived in these
communities for five years, from early 1970
until late 1975 and was in association with them
until late 1977. This is a report on my time
there, on the structure of communities, on the
experience of living there, and on the
philosophy that lay behind it.
A
Note on Terminology
 I
do not use the term anti-psychiatry. I do
not put the words schizophrenia or
schizophrenic in quotes. The point has been
made. I use the words stable and
unstable which have less connotations and
more relevance. When referring to the typical
behavior of a member of the community I use the
word he to avoid the awkwardness of he
or she.
I.
Households
Kingsley
Hall was a massive structure in the East End of
London, once a church hall, leased to our group for
a shilling a year. This is where the experiment
began in its major phase. I spent only two or three
months there, as it was closing, and I will
concentrate on the communities that succeeded it
near Archway, Islington, in North London. I will,
however, speak of Kingsley Hall and compare and
contrast it with Archway when dealing with various
issues.
The
group living at Kingsley Hall toward the end had
lost cohesiveness and the therapists known as the
Philadelphia Association decided, after some
hesitation, to continue the experiment with a new
group. Only three of us, therefore, moved into the
new community. This consisted of two houses in a
deteriorating neighborhood. Since these houses were
scheduled for demolition we had to move to new
homes of the same nature, again and again. This was
difficult and painful but the advantages were that
any damage done to the structures was relatively
unimportant and that there was somewhat less than
the usual necessity for residents to keep up normal
standards of behavior on the streets.
At
Archway we generally had two or three separate
households, each with its own common room, kitchen,
and garden. Each resident had his own bedroom,
unless a couple chose to live together. We made an
effort to provide dinner every night, which would
bring most of us together at a different house.
Having more than one house had a distinct value.
Each household was small, four to six people,
although the community was made up of ten to
fifteen people. One could visit another house, a
different place. If two residents did not get along
one of them could move to another house and keep
apart.
There
were, however, problems. The tendency seemed
inevitable that if there were two houses one of
them would become the good, clean, happy healing
house and the other the bad, dirty, unhappy mad
house. This phenomenon occurred several times as we
moved from house to house. At one time a model good
house became one of the worst of the bad houses.
This problem was partially rooted in the management
of the communities, to which I will refer
later.
One
basic idea was that a balance could be created in
the community between the numbers of relatively
stable and relatively unstable individuals. We were
not, however, at the time fully conscious of the
importance of this. A bad house was one where all
or most of the residents were noisy, disruptive,
and disorganized. A good house was one where a
reasonable balance was struck. If we had all lived
in a single household this problem could not have
arisen in the same way.
I.1
Moving in and Moving Out
When
we moved into Archway from Kingsley Hall, two of
use, including myself, were among the first
residents. Another young man left the Hall and
arrive after a week at Archway against some
resistance, as his behavior could be bizarre,
intolerant, and arrogant. I, however, had come to
like him very much. He became one of the very few
who were actually forced to leave. He had
repeatedly refused to pay rent and had claimed a
common space as his own. We were undecided about
what to do, but the police were called and he was
gone before the officer arrived. Another of the few
was an older man who spent three days at Kingsley
Hall toward its beginning. He was forced to leave
after he destroyed a good part of the interior of
the building.
These
are extreme examples but they indicate the
difficulties that disturbed or disturbing persons
faced on moving in and moving out. For a medical
student the procedure could be much easier. He
could write a letter saying he wished to visit the
community for a week and be accepted. If he was
interested he could later ask to return to stay for
another, longer period of time, three to six
months, and be accepted again. One would hope that
he would help and learn and be responsible. He
would be responsible and he might learn, but he was
essentially being taught by the resident
schizophrenics, or at least learning from them.
Most of the helping, in the absence of a skilled
psychotherapist such as Laing, was done by the
schizophrenics for each other. Having shared
similar experiences, living in a sympathetic
environment as contrasted to a mental hospital,
they could create psychic and emotional space for
others to explore their inner worlds.
If
a person had support from a particular therapist in
the group, he would ask us to accept the new
resident, and we would generally agree. Otherwise,
it could be very difficult to move in. If there was
one applicant and one room there was not
necessarily any problem. He could meet the
residents, make friends with one or more of them
and have a good chance of a space. He and we would
both need to meet each other in order to know if we
could live together, as I any household with a
vacancy. If there were six applicants and one
vacancy a very painful situation could develop,
where a person wanting to live with us had to
present himself both as relatively stable and as
having serious problems to be most likely to be
accepted, a difficult trick to accomplish. At
Kingsley Hall it was worse. If one resident
rejected an applicant he could not move in.
Our
difficulties with choosing new residents were
intimately related to our need to achieve a balance
between people who were whole and strong and people
who needed to go through changes that could involve
bizarre behavior. If too many people were acting
strangely, regressing, going through psychotic
episodes, the community as a whole was threatened,
and nobody could help anybody else. Nobody had the
space, external or internal, within which to
change. Thus the occasional apparent harshness of
our procedures of entry.
The
young man I mentioned above was forcibly evicted.
Others left because it was time for them to go.
Others were removed by relatives, Some, however,
left for financial reasons—they could not pay
the rent. I will deal with money problems
later.
The
community served the residents but also visitors,
people who came to see what it was like, people who
thought they might want to move in, people from
other countries who had set up similar places or
who wanted to learn how to do so. Living with us we
had persons diagnosed schizophrenic,
manic-depressive psychotic, undergraduates, medical
students, and at various times a therapist from New
York, a well-known novelist and a nun. The
residents came from all over the world, Britain,
the United States, Canada, South America, Norway,
Denmark, Germany, etc. It was truly an
international center.
In
spite of the conflicts and chaos that were so
frequent, we tried to create a warm and friendly
atmosphere for visitors and residents alike. We
kept coffee, tea, bread and cheese available at all
times in the kitchen. We tried to welcome visitors
and to entertain them. I myself felt that anyone
who walked through the door was in some way
special, either because of what he knew or because
of what he might learn.
I.2
Community Norms and Values
The
community was an unusual place; ordinary norms did
not apply; bizarre short of extreme violence was
accepted and extreme violence could usually be
tolerated or controlled, as I will explain later.
Yet if there were not rules as such, we had our own
norms. Each resident had the right to his own room.
We tried to keep the rest of the house as clean as
possible, given the messiness and the occasional
destruction that occurred and we painted and we
patched. We tried to keep the kitchen
functioning.
One
important norm was the weekly meeting. The two
therapists most directly involved in our lives
would attend but residents were not required to be
there. Most would usually gather and if we were
discussing an issue involving someone a deputation
would be sent to encourage that person to come
along. An interesting development here was what
could be called the anti-meeting. The general
meeting was in the common room and some residents
might leave in boredom or in protest. But they
would not go farther than the kitchen, where they
would sit and talk. I sometimes found the
discussion at the anti-meeting more interesting and
relevant to current community issues than that at
the general meeting.
We
generally shared a value that life in the country
was better than life in the city, more therapeutic,
as it were. Repeated attempts were made to
establish temporary or permanent centers in the
English countryside. They tended to fail. In the
inner suburbs of London, dirty and disorganized,
our way of life was possible. In the countryside
the local people were shocked and threatened,
understandably perhaps. A group of us spent a week
in Sussex at the home of a woman who like to use
her space to give physically handicapped people
some time in a noninstitutional setting. The maid
arrived one morning and found the lights on and
empty liquor bottles; this was no real disaster.
Yet she spread the word around the village that a
group of crazy people were living at the house and
we became distinctly uncomfortable.
The
worst experience occurred in Devonshire. We had
found an ancient isolated farmhouse on the edge of
the moor and a few miles from the sea and small
groups of us made occasional excursions there of a
few days or a few weeks. Then one of the therapists
decided to spend the month of June there with as
many of his patients and others who wanted to come.
We stayed at the old farmhouse and at whatever
other lodgings we could find. It was like London:
we were students, patients, therapists, a variety
of people. It was a glorious time at the beginning.
The first trouble was almost comic. Rumors began to
spread about naked dancing in the garden of one of
the houses, rumors based on fact. The next trouble
was tragic. A woman was living in lodgings on an
active farm with her husband and three children;
she was one of the most obviously disturbed people
I have ever seen, and had several times attempted
suicide. Although she was closely watched, she
crawled out of a bathroom window and set herself
afire with gasoline. She died of burns in the
hospital soon afterwards. This event effectively
ended any possibility of an "official" community in
that part of Devon. We could still visit as
individuals, after some time had passed, but we had
to guarantee that we were in no way bringing the
community with us.
Her
death struck a blow to our yearning, our need to
live in a healthy rural environment. It was
actually the worst thing tat happened during my
years in the community. But a similar thing could
have happened in the city without the same
devastating consequences. Also, residents were
often naked in the streets of London; we cooperated
with the police in dealing with such situations.
Yet in the country dancing naked in one’s own
garden at night was a scandal, impermissible.
I.3
Management
The
Philedelphia Association is still in existence. As
I knew it when I was in London it was a group of
therapists, social workers and an accountant who
put into practice the ideas developed by Laing and
others. They met at regular intervals and decided
who would concentrate on which task, which aspect
of the overall program. Thus they would share
responsibilities, working with the communities,
giving seminars, fund raising, running the
therapist training program, editing written and
taped material into a book, and so forth. This was
the central structure of the London experiment, of
the network.
But
the hardest job was for the person who lived in the
community and managed the ongoing daily life.
Ideally in each household lived a person called the
administrator. He was paid and given board in
exchange for collecting rent, and keeping the place
clean and in repair. He also provided a center of
stability; it was a house without a resident
administrator that became a bad house. Yet this
additional function, beyond actual administration,
made his job exceedingly difficult. He was less
free than others to change between the roles of
giving and receiving help. He was frequently seen
as a resident therapist, although his job was not
defined as such. Collecting rent was hard enough,
but he often felt called upon to deal with various
crises as he tried to maintain order. In addition
his room might be invaded, his property damaged,
and his sleep disturbed, more than was the case for
the average stable resident.
Most
of the therapists in the network spent six months
to a year living, perhaps with their wives, at
Kingsley Hall. They wanted to share the experience
of living in a community where diagnosed and
non-diagnosed lived together and to find out what
happened. None stayed longer than a year. The
demand on their time and the drain on their
emotions were too great.
I.4
Problems About Money
Theretically
there was no difference between persons in the
network, that extended group that included menders
of the community and many others living elsewhere
in London, therapists, visiting student who
attended seminars, etc. This was generally true in
practice. An individual resident would at times act
as patient, needing and receiving help from others,
and at other times act as therapist, providing that
help for others. The therapists and administrators
helped each other at times of stress and were
strengthened and supported by the humor and
spirituality of the diagnosed members of the
community. Ex-mental patient as well as therapist
could be seen as wise, as a guru, or could show his
pain and distress.
There
were, however, necessary differences. Therapists
tended to live in their own homes with their own
families, although they lived in the communities
for varying periods of time. Quite sensibly, and to
the benefit of all, they chose to maintain their
own strength and stability. Only thus could they
most effectively aid those most unstable.
Additionally, the major difference and the most
difficult to overcome, some paid money and some
received money, within the total group. Some were
poor and some relatively rich. This was in all its
aspects a critical problem for the network, as it
is a critical problem in the world at large.
Therapists
were paid for their fifty minutes and clients gave
the money. The administrator of a house was paid
and all other resident paid a weekly rate which
covered his fee, rent, utilities, repairs and some
food. The therapist who came to meetings, was on
call for crises and generally supervised community
life eventually insisted on being paid for his
work. All this was essentially fair. But it created
a division into two distinct groups and was in
blatant contrast to the theory of equality.
Therapists
and administrators received the money they lived on
from within the community. The community received
its money from outside. It was very difficult as a
resident to hold an outside job, when one uses ones
home as a place to rest from the tensions of work.
The noise and turmoil had an opposite effect,
increasing tension to an intolerable level. I knew
of only one person who for a time held an outside
job. Some received support from parents. Some,
whether from Britain or the Common Market
countries, received welfare or disability payments.
Our rent and expenses, although low, were
unfortunately high enough that they were barely
covered by welfare, leaving little money for
anything else. Thus as in the outside world there
was a vast and visible gap between the haves and
the have-nots.
We
were aware of this problem and it was sometimes an
agony. Many attempts were made to alleviate this
distress. Therapists charged on a sliding scale.
Thus in 1970 as a visiting rich American I would
have been charged nineteen pounds, or almost fifty
dollars, for one consultation with Laing. On the
other hand, he saw one client over a period of
years without charging her a penny except when she
insisted. My own therapist lowered my fee from ten
pounds to eight pounds when I was worried about
money. He also saw a client on welfare for many
years without taking a penny. When I saw Laing for
one session he charged me nothing.
In
the community the poor felt oppressed; they were
expected to pay a share in the fees of the visiting
therapist and the administrator. If someone spent a
welfare check on other things he wanted or needed
and couldn’t pay rent he felt oppressed by the
administrator who asked him for money, particularly
by the administrator who asked and had been asked
repeatedly. People refused to pay rent for various
reasons, for resentment, because they hated or did
not believe in money, but sometimes because they
could not manage to set up welfare arrangement,
could not cope with the authorities. This was
difficult enough for anyone humiliating, but for
someone who felt frightened, threatened or confused
it could be impossible. So the more stable
residents would try to help make welfare
arrangements. Sometimes this worked and sometimes
it did not. In one case a long-term resident was
helped to arrange to receive a book of welfare
checks, whereas normally one had to go to the
office every week. In another case a resident
refused to accept any help with welfare, could not
pay rent, and borrowed money from her
friends.
We
decided to allow one woman, an American whose money
had run out, to stay on at the community rent-free.
But she felt resented; she found it painful and
embarrassing to go into the kitchen and take a
slice of bread. To be happy she needed to pay rent.
Another attempt at solving the rent problem was
unofficial and disorganized. I and six others, all
women, were living in what I have earlier called a
bad, dirty, unhappy, mad house. There was no
administrator living there, and little attention
was given to the noisy and chaotic conditions. The
house was dirty and the kitchen was a mess, and
whenever anyone from another house tried to clean
up they did it in such an arrogant and peremptory
way that some of us found it insufferable. No one
in the house was paying rent, no one was trying to,
largely for these reasons. We did not,
unfortunately, gather together, organize and
present a rent strike to a community meeting. We
were isolated from each other and could not join in
a protest. Neither we nor the rest of the community
were aware of what was going on, of the mutual
projection of goodness and badness between the
houses and that this projection was a cause of our
failure to pay rent.
The
Philadelphia Association is a tax-free charity. It
provided planning and organization of the
communties plus an umbrella of support. Laing never
charged for his visits, which were relatively
frequent, perhaps once a month. No one was ever
evicted for non-payment of rent with the one
exception noted above, although persons sometimes
left when they could not pay. At one time when we
were discussing the question of raising rent Laing
somewhat angrily expressed his hope and belief that
somehow funding could be arranged. Money and its
management were important aspects of community life
which we tried to deal with, sometimes
unsuccessfully. The flow of money is an important
thing. As Laing once put it cryptically, "Money is
social oil."
I.5
Crises and their Containment
This,
then, is the structure within which the experiment
was carried out; this is the place where we dealt
with the crises that occurred when residents under
inner stress, undergoing the experience of being
"mad," exhibited the behavior that can lead to a
diagnosis of schizophrenia. Believing the
experience might have value to the individual we
tried to tolerate, or humanely control, bizarre
activity. The limits of our acceptance were
entirely different from those of the outside world.
We were upset, of course, by disturbing behavior
but we did not need to stop it by violent means,
such as ECT or forced isolation or medication. When
the Archway phase of the experiment had just begun
a young Canadian girl was joining us. I was sitting
in the kitchen with her, several residents, and two
visiting therapists. She was trying to fill out a
government form which asked where she had lived
during the past ten years. She was unable to fill
out the form; she had spent the last five years in
institutions; she burst into deep agonizing sobbing
that lasted for minutes on end. No one tried to
comfort her; no one said, "don’t cry" although
we were all suffering with her. I was outraged at
the seeming indifference of the therapists until I
realized that they were showing a deeper
compassion, feeling pain in order to let her fully
feel her grief.
This
is a relatively minor example of our willingness to
endure and share the suffering of another. A more
extreme example is our acceptance, time and time
again, of smashing and trashing the kitchen. This
seemed a standard response to and communication of
extreme stress. Someone would come downstairs,
enter the kitchen, overturn the table, spilling
everything on it, dump garbage and food all over
the floor and then leave the room. We would clean
up the mess, knowing that this person needed
attention, hopeful that we could help, but also
painfully aware that trashing the kitchen did not
solve his problem.
Other
classic bizarre behaviors were complete or partial
nakedness, and defecating or urinating in community
common space. An individual might take off his
clothes, stop using the toilet or the bath, spend
much time in his room, but sometimes come out,
wrapped perhaps in a blanket, and always smelly. We
would, as best we could, clean common and private
space, and give baths. Yet it was not impossible
for a house to have the pervasive odor of human
excrement.
More
difficult to accept were behaviors we could not, in
effect, clean up. Constant screaming, twenty-four
hours a day until the voice gave out, made it
impossible to sleep at night and hard to function
during the day for the rest of the community.
Frantic, manic activity, writing on the walls,
moving objects about and piling them on top of each
other, running up and downstairs, made it
difficult, for example, to cook dinner. Sometimes
these behaviors were combined.
The
greatest problem we faced was violence. Much of
what I have just described constitutes emotional
violence. This was endurable, if just barely.
Physical violence, causing physical harm to oneself
or another, was not tolerable; the threat of
physical violence we barely endured. A resident
might pick up a knife or a broken bottle and
threaten another. No one was stabbed or cut,
although two cats were killed, once with a knife
and one with a hammer. Apparent suicide attempts
occurred, although they were relatively uncommon.
Entering the kitchen one might find a resident with
his head in the gas oven, but the gas locally
provided at the time was non-toxic. One might find
a resident who had just tried to hang himself but
with a string which had broken. I became convinced
that these were not trued intentions at suicide,
although they had to be taken seriously as a
suicidal gesture can indeed be successful. The only
actual suicide that occurred during my years at the
community is the one I described above. The woman
who died was the most distressed and withdrawn
person I met in the London communities, and the
event took place in the countryside, away from the
close, warming and strengthening environment of
Archway.
We
obviously had to find ways of coping with these
extreme and distressing behaviors that did not
contradict our philosophy of not interfering
violently with what might be valuable inner
experience. We learned the hard way, perhaps the
only way. At Kingsley Hall, when a resident had
screamed for forty-eight hours continually and we
were trying to have dinner, someone briefly sat on
him with his hand over his mouth. For a moment we
had calm and silence but of course it could not
last. He soon started screaming and running about
again. This is not work.
Compassion,
understanding, acceptance, all these were important
and necessary. But they were not sufficient.
Eventually we found a way to contain and lovingly
control the behavior of a person under extreme
stress. We needed to do this for the sake of our
own peace of mind and also because of the problems
that occurred when a person took their screaming or
nakedness into the outside world, to which I will
refer later. One resident at Archway, the Canadian
girl I mentioned, behaved in such distressing ways
that we had to give her total attention. She would
fight, kick, scream, pick up a knife, urinate in
the kitchen or walk out the door, down our street
and into the street of shops completely naked. She
was nevertheless beloved by many of us. She was the
first person to receive twenty-four-hour attention.
To control her violence and keep her from going
outside naked we had to keep her in the common
space and make sure someone was always with her. We
found this painful at first, but over the months
the twenty-four-hour attention became an
institution of its own, and a major way of
restoring order to commuity life.
II.
Here follows a brief theory of such a
community-based therapy:
One
must allow to develop a support group of interested
persons, undergraduates, medical students,
therapists, schizophrenics, neighbors and other who
make themselves available on various levels, living
in the household, visiting the household, or being
on call for any emergencies that might occur. This
support group should be as large as possible,
particularly at the last level.
A
certain degree of noise and disorder can be
tolerated. This depends on the residents and on the
neighbors. However, a real crisis demands immediate
attention and there should be a call to members of
the support group.
There
are two types of crises. The more dramatic would
include suicide attempts, apparent or real, acts or
threats of violence to others, walking naked into
the street, screaming in the street, and so
forth.
Sometimes
such a crisis can effectively be averted by members
of the community, kindly and firmly. If not it may
then be necessary to keep the person in crisis in
some appropriate space, his own room,
another’s room or a common room. The door
would never be locked and probably left open much
of the time. This is twenty-four-hour attention,
with someone always committed to be there. Usually
a group will gather and there will be something of
a party or learning atmosphere. Change will occur
not only in the person in crisis but in others who
are there.
The
person in crisis might at time have to be
physically restrained. But this is not done
mechanically or with medication. A wall of human
flesh is the restraining force, ideally a force of
loving attention. If one desires to prevent the
person in crisis from harming himself or others or
to keep the person from the attention of police and
psychiatry such a practice can be necessary.
The
second type of crisis is more subtle. A resident
may wish to attempt some project, exploring his
inner world, overcoming his loneliness, his fears
or his sadness, or coming off medications, drugs
and alcohol. If the support group is large and
strong enough a resident may request similar
twenty-four-hour attention; or he may be encouraged
to accept twenty-four-hour care, for example to
come off phenothiazines or other substances.
It
should be made known that this type of attention is
available on request, but it should not be forced
on anyone except when absolutely necessary as
during the first type of crisis described
above.
II.1
Relations With The Outside World
A
major concern of ours was our relations with our
neighbors, with the police, and with the local
psychiatric establishment. London is a city which
tolerates eccentricity. One of our residents was
frequently found walking down the street carrying a
broken television set or radio, followed by a
yelling, jeering group of children. He was very
infrequently stopped by the police and then only
when his manner appeared violent. He could stand on
the street corner in front of his house lecturing
the passers-by and remain undisturbed. In addition,
both Kingsley Hall and Archway were in run-down
districts and the police did not need worry about
the annoyance of the upper classes or of
tourists.
At
Kingsley Hall, when I was there at the end of its
five years of existence, relations with the
neighbors were terrible. The children, we felt,
expressed the annoyance of the neighborhood that
the former church hall had been taken away from
them and turned into a madhouse. The children would
break down the front door, leave feces in the front
hall, and run by the building throwing stones at
the windows and breaking them. Five years of
bizarre behavior in the house and on the streets
had proved too much for the East Enders.
Archway
was a neighborhood in transition. People were
moving out as their homes were condemned and others
were moving in temporarily under the aegis of small
independent housing associations. Shops were
closing. Few had a vested interested in keeping up
normal standards of behavior on the streets.
Nakedness
or the apparent threat of violence, however,
attracted the attention of the police. A resident
would, according to legal procedure, be "taken to a
place of safety," the local police station, and put
in a cell, but usually not arrested. There he would
be examined by a psychiatrist and committed to the
local mental hospital for a period of time. It was
then the task of one of our therapists to return
him to the community. Sometimes, it appeared, the
resident did not want to come back, feeling he had
been ill-treated by us in some way, and would not
return for perhaps thirty days. Usually he would be
heavily sedated, and sometimes he would choose to
return to the hospital for regular injections of
prolixin or to take his prescribed daily dose of
thorazine or stellazine. As mentioned above, we did
try to make it possible to stop taking such
medications when he chose.
The
police became aware of who we were and what we were
doing and came to know our residents. The police
accepted their behavior, knowing that they were
living in a half-way house of sorts with
responsible people. The police would sometimes say
they would not intervene if we would keep the
screaming off the streets. There was considerable
good will.
This
was not so much the case with the local psychiatric
hospital. There much depended on the individual
doctor. One might choose to release his patient to
us while another might choose to keep him in
custody. Much negotiation took place between our
therapists and their psychiatrists. No one was
taken away from us; one young man I mentioned
earlier was evicted and ended up in mental
hospital, and one was taken away by his family. We
felt a loyalty to our members, and one of the most
notorious screamers became, in effect, a permanent
resident. He went through considerable change
during his ten years with the community.
In
fact, we were saving the state a good deal of
money. Many of our residents, in the absence of our
efforts, would have been in expensive long-term
custodial care in hospitals. I believe that the
police and the psychiatric establishment and
perhaps higher levels of government were to varying
degrees aware of this.
II.2
Ideas And Values
Within
the community and within the larger extended
network of therapists, students and friends we came
to share a value-system or philosophy that was not
made entirely explicit. This was picked up, at
least in my case, as if by breathing. I was not
learning anything that was not intrinsic to my
being; I was learning about myself, my own values.
Of course, this philosophy came to me from others,
from personal contact and from special books, but
the education I received in London was a
continuation of the intellectual and spiritual
development that had only sometimes coincided with
my earlier formal education. We gradually moderated
our more extreme attitudes toward the family ad
toward psychiatry. In the beginning we tended to
blame the parents for the suffering of a resident.
As Laing has pointed out the behavior of families
of schizophrenics can be quite bizarre and the
behavior of the person diagnosed can make sense in
the context of confusing, contradictory levels of
communication. As a corollary of this idea, and as
a result of the suffering many of our residents had
endured at the hand of their families, we felt
justified in our hatred of mothers and fathers. But
then as various parents visited the community or
even wanted to live there, we learned that they
were not to blame, that they were suffering,
victims of our shared humanity. It was easier to
find a scapegoat than to do without one. From an
initial aversion to any use of thorazine and other
anti-psychotic medications we moved to a feeling
that their use should be voluntary and that we
should try to make it possible to cease their
regular use when one chose. Excess dosage of
phenothiazines seemed invariably non-therapeutic.
Residents who returned to us from hospital were
frequently so sedated as to be unable to function.
A minimul or reasonable dosage, whether by
bi-weekly injection or daily oral self-medication
is not necessarily harmful. Similarly with other
drugs and alcohol, their use should be voluntary,
with the exception of use by injection, which
seemed a form of violence. There were drug addicts
at Kingsley Hall, but several persons who injected
drugs who had moved into Archway finally had to
leave. We should again try to make it possible to
cease regular use, to withdraw.
There
was a special psychic atmosphere within the
communities; there was a hope and a promise; there
was a feeling of the growth of consciousness, of
evolution. The community, with its special norms
and values, its unusual people, seemed almost a
different world than the one outside. Anyone who
walked in the front door, anyone who asked to live
there seemed to be a special person. It was a
spiritual refuge, a place where one could grow and
change and learn in a way that was impossible
outside, like a monastery or a cave in the
mountains.
Much
of this was due to the influence and personality of
Laing himself; his was a spiritual presence. This
is evident in his writings, but only as theory.
Schizophrenics obviously suffer vastly; why then
their glorification? Laing had spent twenty-five
years seeing clients in formal psychotherapy and
fifteen years in some degree of supervision of
households such as I have tried to describe. He was
aware of the pain and confusion of his clients and
of community residents. But he had learned from his
own experience of life and from his relationships
with others that bound up with bizarre behavior and
delusionary experience is an openness to become
aware of meaning. He suffered himself.
That
wild silent screech in the night. And what if I
were to tear my hair and run naked and screaming
through the suburban night. I would wake up a
few tired people and get myself committed to a
mental hospital. To what purpose?
The
entire Bird of Paradise, from which these
lines come, which he later somewhat regretted
publishing, shows his own suffering. He once
mentioned that he had experienced all the forms of
mental illness, with the exception of
obsessive-compulsive neurosis, that he had avoided
the latter, not wanting to get caught in such a
maze. He has also said, "The contract I’ve
made with my mind is that it is free to do anything
it cares to do." He is a man deeply aware of the
potentialities of the psyche, as was Carl
Jung.
Jung,
however, had certain peculiar limitations. He did
not entirely trust his own anima, his own
unconscious. When an inner female voice told him he
was a great artist he resisted, expecting that the
inner woman would later betray him, turn on him,
and say that he was a failure. He spoke of being
forced to use certain yoga postures in order to
control or stop his own inner experience. But most
telling of all was his reaction to a patient, a
doctor who had come to him for a training analysis,
who appeared completely normal. This patient
reported a dream in which he saw a small child in a
vast train station smearing itself with feces, from
which dream he awoke in a panic. Jung writes, "I
knew all I needed to know -- here was a latent
psychosis! I must say I sweated as I tried to lead
him out of that dream. I had to represent it to him
as something quite innocuous, and gloss over all
the perilous details."
Laing
created his communities precisely in order to allow
such regression, and as I have described, it
certainly took place. Jung lacked, perhaps, the
space within which such behavior could occur, or
perhaps the times were not right for it to be
allowed. Jung states that his patient was one the
verge of a fatal panic, that is a panic leading to
death; Laing had discovered that such death could
lead to rebirth, to transformation in some
cases.
Laing
does not want to instruct people, to tell how it
is. He wants people to see this "schizophrenic
voyage" for themselves. He has said,
It
used to be a clinical adage in Scotland, where I
was brought up in psychiatry, that maybe thirty
percent of people diagnosed as schizophrenic
remit, if left to themselves to go through
whatever it is they are going through. Such
people might lie huddled up, completely
regressed—thump the wall in a padded cell
where they would piss and shit where they lay.
There were some cells in most hospitals where
people could do that, and some people would come
in every few years, some only once, and go
through this sort of thing. After three months
or so, they would be out again and functioning
in society at large. Some people were seen as
having recurrent numbers like this, and the
‘good’ clinician could recognize them.
The modern clinician can’t recognize these
people, because he’s never allowed to see
them. He never sees the natural history of the
condition or conditions all this controversy is
about because it is frozen by the
‘tranquilizers,’ ECT, or whatnot, even
in research places. There must be very few (if
any) places in the whole of the United Stated
where people are ‘allowed’ to go
through numbers like this. If only as pure
science, just to see the natural history.
Laing’s
visits to the community were marked by his special
manner, his intentionality, his consciousness. He
would subtly seek out a more unstable new resident
and, without probing or forcing himself on him, let
it be known that he was there. He would visit with
an old-timer that he knew and commune or dance with
him. A withdrawn, isolated, perhaps neglected
resident might come down when he knew that "Ronnie
is here." Laing might come to a community gathering
and sit in complete silence for half an hour and
then deliver a monologue for half an hour,
reminiscent of Carlos Castaneda’s description
of Juan Matus. But when asked about the use of
psychic powers he answered, "Magic is not my
forte."
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