Documentary Movie Review - R D Laing - Asylum

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This movie was made in 1972, and then largely forgotten until its recent DVD release, but it is a very important historical document on the life and work of one of the most important psychiatrists since Freud & Jung. R D Laing was a Scot, who started off his work on the human mind in quite traditional schools of psychiatry when practices such as lobotomization, electro-convulsive shock therapy and enforced cold water duckings were routine. He started developing Sartrean Existentialist theories that many mental illnesses, including schizophrenia, amounted to little more than non-conformist ways of seeing the World. Laing started a bizarre experiment involving giving his patients freedom and space without physical treatments or drugs of any kind. At first patients were allowed to run riot in rumpuss rooms where they could paint, draw, write, scream and rave and just talk through their problems. He then went further and established safe houses in London, including his own home, where rent paying psychiatric patients could live together freely. Asylum features a cinema VERITAS fly on the wall documentary team moving into Laing’s house to film the patients over a six week period. Some of the characters are certainly wild figures, with one chap talking endless stream of consciousness gibberish while one girl cries because she feels like an unexploded nuclear bomb. The asylum of the title refers as much to the house as a safe place as centre for the study of states of mind. It was an offbeat approach to psychiatry and ultimately one that never caught on, partly due to Laing’s own depression, alcoholism and flirtation with new age rebirthing ideas later in life, but the film shows the patients as lovely, needful people who certainly would not have benefited from conventional barbaric treatments. The film, which can get tedious in its delivery at times, is accompanied by three superior fascinating short features on Laing, including footage of a lecture he gave to his many readers in the US. His handling of a heckler who tries denouncing him as a hack is simple and direct as he just tells the guy to make love to himself and stop pre-supposing answers based on what he has already read. It is great that Laing’s neglected rather unconventional but perfectly credible early theories are now gaining a powerful renaissance. Arthur Chappell