Kingsley Hall

In 1965 R. D. Laing and his colleagues asked the Lesters for use of the Hall as a community for themselves and people in a state of psychosis. As a result, Kingsley Hall became home to the Philadelphia Association and one of the most radical experiments in psychiatry.^[20] Based on the notion that psychosis, a state of reality akin to living in a waking dream, is not an illness simply to be eliminated through the electric shocks favoured in the Western tradition of the time but, as in other cultures, a state of trance which could even be valued as mystical or Shamanistic, it sought to allow schizophrenic people the space to explore their madness and internal chaos.^[21] Residents (in the grip of psychosis) were often treated with kindness and respect with sincere efforts to alleviate their suffering.