USA: Gnosis Retreat Center Hosts West Coast Premiere Of Mad To Be Normal Today


The United States West Coast premiere of David Tennant's feature film Mad To Be Normal will take place today hosted by Gnosis Retreat Center. The event takes place this afternoon at 1pm at Legion of Honor (Gunn Theater), 100 34th Avenue, San Francisco.

In Mad To Be Normal, David Tennant stars as the controversial Scottish psychiatrist, R.D. Laing whose revolutionary approach to the treatment of mental illness still influences psychiatry today. The award winning movie focuses on the infamous anti-psychiatry experiment that Laing ran at Kingsley Hall - a medication-free sanctuary which made headlines around the world. During the 1960s and 1970s Laing was an international celebrity. In Santa Monica, 4,000 people turned out to see him perform a lecture, a week after Bob Dylan had pulled in the same number. A radio journalist confidently referred to him as the “white Martin Luther King.” His books topped student reading lists the world over, as his language excited and enthralled them: “a child born today stands a 10 times greater chance of being admitted to a mental hospital than to a university….perhaps it is our very way of educating them that is driving them mad… [and]…”so- called ‘normal men’ have in the last 50 years killed perhaps 100 million of their fellow normal men”. It was opinions like these which turned the psychiatric establishment against him.

The event will include a panel made up of friends of R.D. Laing; people who lived in the houses started by Laing, worked with him, and knew him intimately.

The premiere is proudly presented by Gnosis Retreat Center and sponsored by the California Institute of Integral Studies PsyD department. The Center is a fundraising project aiming to provide a residence and safe space for people in mental crisis in the San Francisco Bay Area. For more information about the project and to make a donation please visit www.gnosisretreatcenter.org

Mad To Be Normal will be released on VOD in the USA on Friday 16th February and on DVD on 13th March.


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