Son of RD Laing - skrink who blamed madness on poor parenting - found dead in tent beside vodka

Son of RD Laing - psychiatrist who blamed madness on poor parenting - found dead in a tent beside an empty vodka bottle

By Michael Seamark and Jennifer Sudgen
n 23rd May 2008


The son of Sixties cult psychiatrist RD Laing, who championed the use of LSD and claimed families create madness, has been found dead in a tent on a Mediterranean island.

An empty vodka bottle and a quantity of drugs were found at the feet of the badly- decomposed body of 40-year-old Adam Laing.

Spanish police have yet to establish the exact circumstances of Mr Laing's death. But his half-brother said yesterday his sibling had died after 'a wild night gone wrong' on the tiny island of Formentera, near Ibiza.

His maverick father, a heavy drinker who regularly took LSD with his patients, was an icon of the 1960s counter-culture movement.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1021176/Son-RD-Laing--psychiatrist-blamed-madness-poor-parenting--dead-tent-vodka-bottle.html

Odd characterization of Laing. He was most famous for suggesting that many 'crazy people' were in fact having a quite sane response to an insane world. Wiki agrees with me:

"He is noted for his views, influenced by existential philosophy, on the causes and treatment of mental illness, which went against the psychiatric orthodoxy of the time by taking the expressions or communications of the individual patient or client as representing valid descriptions of lived experience or reality rather than as symptoms of some separate or underlying disorder. He is often associated with the anti-psychiatry movement although, like many of his contemporaries also critical of psychiatry, he himself rejected this label. He made a significant contribution to the ethics of psychology."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._D._Laing

The daily mail is just taking a journalistic cheapshot. Duh.

anyway, curse RD Laing for the anguish of every parent who because of him wrongfully blamed themselves for their offspring's mental illnesses

What Laing actually claimed was that during psychosis people act out the family agenda they've been acclimatised to.

Lots of studies of children of alcoholics, addicts, gamblers etc allude to a 'family sickness' of co-dependency which in psychotic and delusional states morph into personal psychodramas.

I've got a better headline.

"DailyMail writers smear dead psychiatrist"

It's like they didn't even bother to read his Wiki page.

Personally, I'll remember Laing best as the author of the lyrics to English prog rock group Gentle Giant's tune "Knots". That's what made me want to read some of his books.

I don't think that makes any sense. They're as happy or unhappy as anybody else out there. Why do we expect them to live happy, normal lives?