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This article explores the circulation of ‘anti-psychiatry’ in British film and television during the long 1960s, focusing on the controversial BBC television play In Two Minds (1967) and its cinema remake Family Life (1971). These films were inspired by R. D. Laing's ideas on the aetiology of schizophrenia, and were understood as uniting the personal and political motivations of progressive film-makers (Ken Loach, Tony Garnett, David Mercer) and progressive psychiatrists (Laing, David Cooper, Aaron Esterson). Drawing upon practitioner interviews with producer Garnett and director Loach, and extensive archival research on the production and reception of these films , this article contests previous scholarship on the popular circulation of anti-psychiatry and the movement's perceived polarisation from mainstream British psychiatry. While the reception of In Two Minds and Family Life did intensify an adversarial relationship between ‘rebel’ anti-psychiatrists and hard-line behaviourists such as William Sargant, the wider psychiatric field largely welcomed the films' contributions to mental health awareness and used the publicity to counter the idea of a ‘battle’ within the profession. This included leading UK mental health organisation the National Association for Mental Health looking to Loach and Laing as models for engaging contemporary audiences as it rebranded to MIND in 1972 . This article contributes to historical understandings of the complex interactions between the fields of media and mental health, as well as recent scholarship challenging the idea of a clear split between anti-psychiatry and British medical orthodoxy.

This article will demonstrate the significant influence that psychiatric consultants exerted on the policy of the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) and, as a result, on cinematic representations of mental illness and psychiatric practices during what Arthur Marwick (2005) called the ‘long 1960s’. Drawing upon extensive research at the British Board of Film Classification archives, this article complicates dominant narratives of British censorship in highlighting how John Trevelyan, appointed as Secretary of the BBFC in 1958 and frequently depicted as a liberalising force, deferred to psychiatric expertise outside the BBFC in making decisions about film censorship and certification and, in some instances, scriptwriting and editing. This article will explain how a proliferation of American and, later, British films dealing with mental illness caused BBFC examiners to lose confidence in their ability to make censorship decisions in the mid-1960s. Initially, this loss of confidence prompted consultation with the influential British mental health organisation, the National Association for Mental Health (NAMH) and, subsequently, a small group of trusted medical professionals, referred to as ‘psychiatrist friends’, who decided on cuts and certification of films including The Caretakers (1963), The Collector (1965) and Repulsion (1965). As a result, the BBFC moved from a default position of prohibition to one of enabling ‘serious’ films that promoted mental health awareness and discussion of contemporary mental health issues. This article aims to offer new insights into the policies, processes and practices of the BBFC, to contextualise censorship within historical debates about mental health representation and to highlight the mutually productive interactions that took place between the fields of mental health and cinema.

This introduction provides context for a collection of articles that came out of a research symposium held at the Science Museum's Dana Research Centre in 2018 for the ‘ Demons of Mind: the Interactions of the ‘Psy’ Sciences and Cinema in the Sixties' project. Across a range of events and research outputs, Demons of the Mind sought to map the multifarious interventions and influences of the ‘psy’ sciences (psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis) on film culture in the long 1960s. The articles that follow discuss, in order: critical engagement with theories of child development in 1960s British science fiction; the ‘horrors’ of contemporary psychiatry and neuroscience portrayed in the Hollywood blockbuster The Exorcist (1973); British social realist filmmakers' alliances with proponents of ‘anti-psychiatry’; experimental filmmaker Jane Arden's coalescence of radical psychiatry and radical feminist techniques in her ‘psychodrama’ The Other Side of the Underneath (1973); and the deployment of film technologies by ‘psy’ professionals during the post-war period to capture and interpret mother-infant interaction.

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