The son of radical psychiatrist RD Laing tells Steve Pratt about his late father’s weird ways and why they prompted him to write a novel

GROWING up the son of the radical Swinging Sixties “shrink” RD Laing is enough to make you need therapy. For everyone who calls Laing one of the most influential psychiatrists of modern times, there’s someone else calling him a madman or a charlatan.

This psychiatrist advocated “rebirthing” – a symbolic new beginning – and experimented with LSD in his therapies. He blamed the family for many mental traumas, yet as one of his ten children by four women noted, he had “nothing to do with his own family”. In his later years, he sank into alcoholism and depresssion, ceased practising medicine after the General Medical Council brought a case against him, and died of a heart attack on the French Riviera in 1989.

His son, Adrian, a media lawyer who has written a biography of his father, not only had practical knowledge of rebirthing (a bit like being in a rugby scrum, but without a referee present is how his son described the process) but also his father’s behaviour in later years.

“He was not in the public eye in the late 1970s and 1980s unless it was for all the wrong reasons,” he says. “I got called up at two in the morning and had to bail my dad out of the police station. That’s when I thought ‘this is getting a bit much’.

“From 1981 to 1985, it was just embarrassing, seeing my dad drink on TV or reports of him misbehaving all over the world. I used to berate him – it was a bit like Ab Fab where the daughter tells off the mother.”

Having a famous, some might say notorious, father is something he has learnt to manage. “When I practised at the bar, mainstream psychiatrists were thought to be loopy. I didn’t tell my chambers who my father was until my leaving do. They said if they’d known that, they’d never have taken me on.”

With a celebrity psychiatrist for a father – whose devotees are said to have included Sean Connery, Edna O’Brien and Jim Morrison – perhaps it was inevitable that he’d write a book called Rehab Blues, set in a rehabilitation centre called The Place, where guests can enjoy paparazzi therapy, primal scream treatment, swap gender or get rebirthed.

Its characters include a sex-obsessed footballer, shoplifting soap star, cross-dressing cage fighter and incontinent rock star. They are not, despite what you may be thinking, real people. As a showbiz lawyer, Laing knows how far he can go and he emphasises these are types, not specific people.

He’s always harboured an ambition to write a book, but says: “It’s such a long haul to write a fulllength novel that you have to have a very strong idea that’s going to take you the distance.

“I really wanted to write something that’s funny.

Rehab places for celebrities seemed right. Once I’d germinated and worked on the characters, and the therapies, I was determined to see that through.”

THERE is, he maintains, nothing funnier than laughter therapy. Of the many therapies featured in the book, only one relates directly to any of the theories his father used – rebirthing. “I had personal experience of that,” he says.

The Place in Rehab Blues is a fashionable upmarket rehabilitation centre where celebrities go for treatment. For him, celebrities are nothing new.

They’ve always been around, from Hollywood movie star through TV and now sports stars.

“There’s always been this bad habit of people wanting to emulate celebrities whether it’s shoes, handbags or behaving the way they do. You have this bizarre culture we created by giving people credence as celebrities,” he says.

Adrian has never undergone therapy. “I walk a lot and did martial arts with my boys for five years – that was therapy enough,” he says.

Unlike his father and his complicated personal life, he has been married for 24 years and the youngest of his five children is 16. He’s also been a practising lawyer for many years.

“To me, it’s almost common sense how not to conduct yourself in too extreme a manner. I suppose I am an optimist in that I do believe the vast majority of us know the difference between good and bad behaviour, between treating people well and treating them badly.”

  • Rehab Blues (Gibson Square Books, £7.99)