‘Loonies’, they shouted from the back of the coach. ‘Loonies!’ I can't remember if we had reached the gates of the mental hospital yet, but I was excruciatingly embarrassed, and I prayed that they would stop. It didn't help me very much that I understood, to an extent, what had provoked some of the students in my year to such cruel mockery. It was 1974. Sociology had just become a compulsory subject at our medical school in London. The young sociology lecturers had arrived with a mission to radicalize the next generation of doctors, offering us the latest critiques of medicine and of psychiatry. An instructive coach trip into the countryside, to visit one of the vast Victorian ‘bins’ that still peppered Hertfordshire, Essex and Surrey, was not proving to be helpful. In retrospect, we were all caught up a painful historical drama concerning views of madness. The sociologists were fired with a conviction that everything we were about to see was a demonstration of how society oppressed and imprisoned free spirits in the name of medical treatment. The students felt provoked by this, and were no doubt fearful as well, and they regressed into viciousness. …