RD Lang I am discovering his approach to mental health

 

 I am taking a break from housework as I am listening to the work of RD Lang he was a very controversial psychiatrist who did something amazing and it has a lasting legacy today and I am just diving into his work. His most famous work is the Kingsley Hall experiment, made famously but the film staring David Tennant called Mad to me normal and we see that what he did was transform psychiatrists from simply medicating people and turning them into zombies to taking them out of their shitty environment generally institutions and giving them dignity and living with them.

He when looking through the lens of modern thinking he was really ahead of his time in the fact that he was able to see past the mental illness and see the person, to me and I need to do some more digging I feel that this was the start of person centred  care as we see that people need to be very aware of what is happening in the field of mental health and he didn’t see his clients as “ uncompliant” or drug resistant, but as people who had a mental illness and essentiality created a new frame work to work in and refused to accept the thinking of the time that every person with mental illness need to be in full time institutional care, this to me is ground breaking as most of my long term readers would be very aware that some people with severe mental illness  might need full time care, yes but by talking out the delusions psychosis we see that people where able to challenge what they now call in mental health treatment core believes and he was very much grounded in the hear and now, for the patients.

But we see that people need to be treated with dignity and respect and this is where many mental health issues can arise this to me is a topic that we need to be talking about a lot more because people don’t need to be told that they are uncompliant, or treatment-resistant when they have a very shitty life and we are now hearing unconventional l terms like shitty life syndrome or even our medical thinking has also moved to blur the lines between mental health and disability as some mental health conditions can cause a disability or severe impairment of functionality.

Also at the time, people with disabilities were institutionalized and to me, this forward-thinking person took people who he saw had the chance to recover away from a clinical environment we see that there are some similarities to the Kingsley Hall experiment with people with disabilities that lead to a revolution in the way we treat and work with people who have disabilities this being the commonplace term, person-centered care and it focuses on the client's abilities and not their disabilities, it’s a strength-based approach to disability that expects the clients to be responsible for there own lives to the best of there abilities.

I am not sure when it was done but there was an experiment that led to what we now call Sil houses and the ongoing removal or restructuring of “ group homes” for people with disabilities it was called the Share House of Dreams where you people who were cared for at home by family members and often these where elderly parents moved into a group home with minimal supervision but they had a  direct support worker visiting the house to see what was going on and it was realized that if a support worker was in the house most of the time or a lot of the time and the clients where responsible for keeping the house clean it could work on a larger scale, it’s not perfect but any system designed by humans isn’t going to be perfect.

I am only really scratching the surface of his work as he was very controversial at the time and let's say his ethics could have been considered questionable but we see that he had a lasting legacy in that he created a new way of thinking around disability and mental illness in seeing the person first and not the illness. I am going to do a much deeper dive as I found him as I don’t sleep very well at night due to living with chronic pain and shojrnis syndrome and I ended up on the “ weird side of YouTube,” but I have been aware of his work but didn’t know that some of his lectures ended up on YouTube and that some of his clients also agreed to be interviewed and recorded. This to me is amazing because people needed care and a new level of care that institutions couldn’t provide to some clients so we are also in the disability community seeing a changing of the guard, and a change in thinking as we are seeing a change to person-centered care in disability services as well and it is at times great but for other people, we see that the lack of structure is a very bad thing but time will tell what the legacy is around disability and the value of the lives of people with disabilities.

I recently had to take an Instagram real down because some people didn’t like my tone and told me I was coming across as a self-centered use  and I was going to throw myself to the wolves in asking if am I an ase for asking for service providers to do better by vulnerable adults with a disability and calling it out or should I accept that I am “ lucky to have a package” and to stick to palatable topics around disability?  I have been questioning this myself and I am starting to research what people are saying about disability as it’s taken me a long time to accept that I have a disability and what my family did for me pre 2020 was considered support.

They don’t see me as disabled but I see that this is a double-edged sword as I am nearly 40 and still feel at time like a teen as this is the way that many people treat me, I am trying to be an adult but I simply can’t keep up. I am also starting to question many of my core beliefs about myself and the people whom I have allowed to speak into my life so we need to be very aware of my being ADHD and having potential hypersensitivity to rejection, and I haven’t disclosed this but I am open to being romantic with both genders as well and being single and not having a job or many community connections and having sensible rules in the housing facility I am in I do lack the opportunity to meet people as I live in a very conservative area, I am also scared of what people would think, I am also trying to have discretion being the better part of valor in not talking about my deeply personal life and relationships on the internet,  I want to be able to talk about it but I know that consent is a massive issue around this and my family and friends haven’t consented to be talked about as well.

But let me conclude hear and start talking about how I can start being a better person and get out and meet people and have the experiences that others have had in their 20s and 30s that I am looking for in relationships now and I am realizing that it’s not all unicorns and rainbows but complicated and messy and that by living in my delusions that I can keep up with others isn’t great but there are other factors that I am really not ready to talk about as I now that there are times when I am not really attached to reality but know that I am not attached to reality.  So let's start the conversation around the complex links between disability and mental health that seems to have stalled and been coopted to be conversations around how much our care is costing the government but are we counting the cost in lives lost due to neglect abuse and exploitation?