ABSTRACT
The title of this chapter poses a question which, in the heady Laingian days of the 1960s, many would have regarded as merely rhetorical. For most of that decade — and a little while beyond —schizophrenia seemed about to shake off its medical strait-jacket for good and be reconstructed as a form of suffering having its origins, not in a diseased brain, but in the social and psychological circumstances of victimized or labelled individuals. That such a formulation should fail was inevitable since, like all protest movements, the alternative psychiatry of the day overstated its case and stubbornly refused to see anything of worth in the professional Establishment's perspective on, and management of, schizophrenia. More seriously, they failed their patients and in retrospect it is not — for all its insights and intellectual brilliance —Laing's (1960) The Divided Self that makes the greater impact; rather it is David Reed's (1977) Anna, the tragic story of an individual schizophrenic who was persuaded by a Laingian doctor to face up to her madness without drugs and whose slow, painful death from self-inflicted burns symbolizes in the most awful way the end of an era in psychiatry.
