Penicillin of the Mind?

There was a time in the late 1960s and ’70s when madness, or more accurately the appearance of benign craziness, became chic. On campuses throughout the western world, eccentricity, drug taking, protests, free speech movements and the occupation of university offices became a norm. The rhetoric was powerful: the power of the prosaic, rational, mercantile fathers was to be over-thrown and a new freedom was about to be born. Because of all this and not to be left out of things, a week on “madness” was planned by University of Toronto students.

I was invited to debate R.D. Laing’s associate David Cooper in Convocation Hall. The intention was clear: I was to be the institutional psychiatric “heavy” pitted against the liberating prophet Cooper, whose book The Death of the Family had achieved a reputation as a blow against bourgeois norms.

Inside the crowded hall, a young woman suckled her baby in the front row, dogs roamed the aisles and there was a...