The movie itself is not very good - David Tennant does a solid job as Laing, but the script is very meandering and not very engaging, I was pretty bored at times, and Elizabeth Moss - despite being a good actress - is, to me, distractingly unattractive, and her prominent role as the screeching harpy girlfriend was poorly integrated into the script.

Regarding Laing himself, I’ve heard of him before but have not studied him. He was known as the “Acid Marxist” - while he wasn’t a strict Marxist theorist, he borrowed from him the idea that institutions (psychiatry, family, state) are instruments of domination. Laing fused this with existential psychology and countercultural experimentation. What interested me about him was (1) he did not give his patients medication, believing that they had to work out their issues themselves, and (2) yes, he experimented with Acid with inconclusive results (alternatively, MDMA is, apparently, very good at helping with PTSD and other trauma). A good friend of mine with schizophrenia took heavy medication for it, but he eventually got off it because it turned him into an unthinking zombie. - he also later killed himself, so I’m really not sure what to think here. Regarding LSD, Ernst Junger experimented with it with LSD’s creator, and I have a draft about it which I may or may not eventually publish. Personally, I have never tried it, although I have interest.

Laing himself is kind of a bastard - he had 10 kids from 4 different women, spent little to no time with his children, and some of them met quite poor ends - he embodied a contradiction of someone critiquing the family while wrecking his own, which is a poor show. He wanted to be famous and spent a lot of time partying and whoring around. I may read one of Laing’s books as I am interested in his attacks on traditional psychiatry, but he doesn’t seem like he will have the full set of answers I am looking for: he undermined psychiatry’s materialist reductionism, but stopped at existentialism/counterculture and didn’t ground his critique in metaphysics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_to_Be_Normal

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5782791&forum_id=2\u0026show=6hr#49323353)

two of his books, Sanity & Madness in the Family and The Divided Self, are very good. his conception of schizophrenia is that it is 'ontological insecurity' arising when one fails to form a stable 'Self.' he does a kind of extremely autistic, diagrammatic analysis of 'intersubjectivity' and social reality, of how all of the many hidden layers of invalidating sub-sub-sub-communication that pass unnoticed in daily and family life can undermine the sense of the Self and drive people to madness. it's well done and underrated.

he became a drunk and none of his later work is coherent.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5782791&forum_id=2\u0026show=6hr#49323488)