Scottish psychiatrist Ronald David Laing (1927–1989) was born in Govanhill, Glasgow. He gained international fame with The Divided Self (1960), a book that challenged the concept of mental illness, a term he openly rejected.

About knowledge, he mused, “If I don’t know I don’t know, I think I know. If I don’t know I know, I think I don’t know.”

Laing’s revolutionary “anti-psychiatry” stance honored all experience as valid and enriching. He often placed blame not on the individual, but on society and family systems for emotional distress.

In The Politics of Experience (1967), he argued that society itself fosters disconnection and disorder. “Insanity is a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world,” he said.

“Perhaps men and women were born to love one another, simply and genuinely, rather than to this travesty that we call love,” he wrote. “If we can stop destroying ourselves, we may stop destroying others.”