Mental Health

Writer Doris Lessing. Since her first novel, The Grass is Singing, published in 1950, she has written many books and plays, including the Children of Violence series, The Golden Notebook, and more recently Shikasta and her "space-fiction" series. Her new novel is titled The Fifth Child. Fresh Air book critic John Leonard once described Mrs. Lessing as "one of the half-dozen most interesting minds to have chosen to write fiction in English in this century."

R. D. Laing is a psychiatrist who challenged conventional views in the 1960s with his proposal that schizophrenia was an adaptive behavior, "a sane response to an insane world," as opposed to an illness. The counterculture embraced Laing's views, but they were controversial in academic circles. In 1965, Laing formed the Philadelphia (for brotherly love, not the city) Association, an alternative treatment center for schizophrenics.

Psychotherapist Myron Sharaf has written a biography on the researcher Wilhelm Reich, who developed the study of orgonomy. Reich worked for greater sexual reforms in pre-World War II Berlin before continuing his research in the United States.

Bill Eisenhuth and Pam Killman of Philadelphia's Advocates for the Mentally Disabled, and LIZ ROBINSON, of the People's Emergency Center, join the show to discuss the homelessness and homeless people in Philadelphia and across the country.

Dr. Harry Zall is a psychiatrist at the Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital. He joins the show to discuss mental depression.

Novelist Judith Viorst has written humorous books for children and for adults and is also a contributing editor to Redbook. Viorst spent years studying at the Psychoanalytic Institute in Washington, D. C. before writing her new book, "Necessary Losses." The non-fiction work's subject is coping with loss.