ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the experiences of a group of research participants, including R. D. Laing's peers. It considers the liminal space, particularly in regard to treatment and describes how therapists treat one another as individuals might impact on that treatment. Their work, including Kingsley Hall, opened up myriad questions about ethics, power, and certainty in treatment—not all of them intentional. Gary's Cairney experiences of treatment add a valuable context to the experiences of people who were psychotherapeutic practitioners. Participants feared that the net result of this trend would be ever-increasing restrictions imposed on what they perceived as the more liberal end of the mental health treatment spectrum—psychotherapy. Lack of public engagement was seen as extending into the psychotherapeutic community's lack of engagement with political aspects of mental health issues. Hoarding all eggs in this research basket creates a powerful bias towards mechanistic, biological assumptions of mental illness, and therefore fuels a disposition towards the rigid attachment to symptom and diagnosis.
