Politics & Power Quote by R. D. Laing

Laing’s line lands like a crowbar in the clinic door: it denies schizophrenia as a natural kind while insisting the word itself still has teeth. The move is classic anti-psychiatry Laing - not a claim that people don’t suffer, but that “schizophrenia” is less a discovered disease entity than a social decision about how to name, interpret, and manage certain forms of distress, terror, dissociation, and nonconformity.

The sentence is engineered to pivot from ontology to power. “No such condition” targets the medicalized confidence of mid-century psychiatry, which often treated diagnosis as a neutral mirror of biology. Then Laing flips the table: the label is a “social fact.” Once uttered by a doctor, stamped on a file, repeated by family, it reorganizes a person’s life. It authorizes confinement, forced medication, surveillance, welfare decisions, custody outcomes, employment exclusion. Even if the category is fuzzy or culturally contingent, it becomes real in its consequences - a kind of bureaucratic alchemy.

Calling that social fact “a political event” sharpens the accusation. Diagnosis is not merely descriptive; it distributes legitimacy. It defines whose perceptions count, whose narratives get discounted, whose anger becomes “symptom,” whose vulnerability becomes “risk.” In the 1960s and 70s - amid asylums, tranquilizers, and rising skepticism about institutions - Laing is warning that psychiatry can function as social control dressed up as care. The sting is that the most decisive moment may not be breakdown, but being officially named.