Review of Mad to be Normal

A film about R D Laing, focusing on the therapeutic community at Kelsey Hall in London's East End in the period 1965-70. Nicely acted - David Tennant is good as Laing himself, and Elizabeth Moss is very good as Angie Wood, the woman who become his lover and has a child with him (he has another family with four children in Glasgow).

But - like lots of people at the time and subsequently - the film is not sure whether Laing is a messianic genius who had developed a therapeutic alternative to conventional psychiatry, or a charlatan who actually did a lot of harm and never really helped anyone. It shows him criticizing psychiatry...all the conventional shrinks are stuffy men in pinstripe suits who are smugly confident in their abusive treatments, and we see his kind empathy with mad people that seems to work at getting through to them and understanding the symbolic meanings of their apparently bizarre behaviour.

But the film also shows it all ending in failure, and not all of that is the fault of the system's backlash. The people living in the therapeutic community don't actually get 'better', they just develop a different way of living with their illness, and one in particular becomes ever more set in his terrifying religious mania so as to become a threat to everyone else. We see this, but we don't see whether Laing has an answer, only that he feels bad about it.

Not a bad film, despite this contradiction at the centre of it.

Watched on Amazon Prime via Chromecast. Small technical afternote; this week I threw away our Amazon Fire Stick. Weird to think that a year ago Amazon thought it was OK to develop its own entirely independent technical device for streaming, and that we would all be fine with that. I would have liked to have given it to someone, but couldn't work out how to remove my account and password from the device...the advice on the support pages didn't appear to work.