Reflections of a Public Loony

Abstract

Reflections of a Public Loony Sandy Jeffs (bio) I have been a public loony for over thirty years. In an act of reclaiming my life from the catastrophe of schizophrenia, sharing my story with audiences empowered me to write my own narrative and to eventually see my life through a lens of hope. This act of hope was important because when I was diagnosed in 1976, hope was the first casualty of what was then considered a virtual death-sentence. The magnitude of such an existential crisis cannot be understated. For those of us who carried this diagnosis, we were condemned to a life of irretrievable madness from which we would never recover. That was the messaging we got from clinicians. But in the 1970s psychiatry was under attack in a world that was in a state of flux. The anti-authoritarian 1960s and 70s were heady times for social activism. The Civil Rights movement was in full swing in the USA while the Feminist and Gay Liberation movements across the world were gathering steam. And the antipsychiatry crusade was making waves in the world’s universities where sociology departments and intellectuals were enthusiastic followers of R.D. Laing, Cooper, Thomas S. Szasz, Erving Goffman, and Michel Foucault. Mad people, too, were emboldened by antipsychiatry which offered a robust critique of psychiatry and madhouses in which they were confined. These were characterised as oppressive, dehumanising institutions that represented all that was bad in a world ruled by capitalism. Schizophrenics were portrayed as victims who needed to be rescued from the clutches of psychopathic psychiatrists while tyrannical madhouses were seen as instruments of oppression. Placards from the mass demonstrations in Paris in 1968 proclaimed: Schizophrenics are the Proletariat! Maverick psychiatrist and the darling of the antipsychiatry movement, R.D. Laing, wrote seminal texts in which he describes schizophrenia as a sane response to an insane world. He offers a positive spin on a diagnosis that had such a negative clinical profile. In The Politics of Experience Laing writes that ‘if the human race survives, future men will … look back on our enlightened epoch as a veritable age of Darkness … they will see what we call ‘schizophrenia’ as one of the forms in which, often through quite ordinary people, the light began to break through the cracks in our all-too-closed minds’.1 He goes on further to say ‘madness need not be all breakdown, it may also be break-through’.2 Schizophrenia, according to Laing, was [End Page 174] more like an awakening, a window into higher consciousness which at the time was what a lot of hippie and counter-culture young folks were searching for, often through the agency of recreational drugs. As a young student at La Trobe University in the 1970s which, ironically, was built on land excised from the large acreage on which three psychiatric institutions were built, including Larundel Psychiatric Hospital, I came across antipsychiatry in my sociology and history studies. Sociology was a forceful, unforgiving opponent of psychiatry, and it was where I was made aware of the infamous Rosenhan experiment that was seminal in the growing chorus against psychiatry. Psychologist by training, David Rosenhan set out to prove that clinicians could not distinguish the mad from the sane and to discredit the ‘pseudo-science’ of psychiatry. He sent students posing as voice-hearers into psychiatric hospitals. On presentation they were admitted into a ward and assessed by psychiatrists. They then acted normally and said they were no longer hearing voices. They weren’t believed and were forced to take medication. When they were finally discharged, all but one of the fake patients left with the diagnosis of ‘schizophrenia in remission’.3 It caused a storm in the academic world and an even bigger storm for psychiatry which had been embarrassed by the revelations that the veracity of psychiatric diagnoses was very shaky if not completely spurious. The case against psychiatry was mounting as was the case against the big stand-alone psychiatric hospitals. It was in the midst of this milieu that I began my career as a ‘psych patient’. Influenced by my studies, and by charismatic lecturers, I took on board the...