Asylum

The inmates are running the asylum in Peter Robinson's scruffy documentary, but it's not a mental institution — the title uses "asylum" in the sense of a refuge where damaged people can regroup and find their own path to coping with the larger world. One of the most visible mental-health figures of the 1960s, R.D. Laing, spearheaded the anti-psychiatry movement, which proceeded from the notion of insanity as a social construction rather than a disease. On a practical level, Laing suspected that troubled people — at least those who weren't violent or barking mad — might do better in settings where they were made responsible for their own progress, rathe...