RONALD DAVID LAING is a practicing British psychiatrist who seriously questions whether psychiatry is always useful or even necessary. He contends that drugs, shock treatment and other physical-chemical therapy can be totally ineffectual as well as unspeakably cruel. He regards most psychiatric examinations as "degradation ceremonials" during which the doctor naively assumes that his behavior is quite normal and that the patient is ipso facto insane. Mental hospitals, Laing believes, are little more than prisons that strip their inmates of all civil rights. And even though his scholarly, lucid studies (The Divided...
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