![]() If they had known, they might have been struck by the horrible irony that one of Ronald David Laing's lasting contributions to psychiatry in the 1960s and 70s was linking mental distress to a dysfunctional family upbringing. 'He never talked about him,' says Hector Puig, 47, a handyman. Many of Adam's friends on the island he made his home had no idea who his father was. Whatever the circumstances, perhaps he didn't have enough energy or power in him to deal with life.' I sometimes wondered if he would get lost on one of his travels on the ocean or break his neck skiing down a wild mountainside. He tried to soothe it with smoking, sometimes with drugs and with drinking as a sort of self-medication. I think that was a very sad period of time for Adam. 'When he was 13, 14, 15, he was rebellious, he dropped out of school. Dr Itten says the break-up of his parents' marriage - Adam's mother, Jutta, separated from Laing in 1981 - affected him badly. 'I think Adam caught the depressive mood from his father,' says the psychotherapist Theodor Itten, a former student of RD Laing who later became a close family friend. He seemed all right at the end.'īut Adam was not all right and, despite his outgoing demeanour, had not been for some time. I saw him a few days before his body was found, and we went on drinking into the night. Adam was at the point of packing his bags. He was not short of money but he was saying he was ready to leave. 'He had split up with his girlfriend of four or five years and he had no work organised. 'I think he was depressed before he died,' says shipwright Jorge Agusti. It was here that his body was found, in an isolated field far away from home, accessible only by criss-crossing dusty tracks. Then, a month ago, in an increasingly fragile state of mind, he erected a tent in a wooded area near Janina's home, on private land owned by a British couple he knew. ![]() At first he looked after Scherr's yacht in the port of La Savina, sleeping on the boat. He moved out of the house they shared in Cap de Barberia, a tranquil corner away from the tourist beaches. I think it will take some time to sink in.'įriends say he had grown melancholic since his separation from Janina, a German diving instructor, at the end of last year. He was a lovely guy and it was a shock to hear of his death. 'He needed the challenge of the ocean.' Adrian adds: 'Adam found his own way in life. 'He was a bit wild but a good guy,' says Nicholas Scherr, who moors a yacht on the island. He was a regular at the Bar es Cap, where owner Mariano Mayans remembers him as 'a good man who liked his drink but could handle it.' A sailor at heart, Adam had crossed the Atlantic 11 times and was, by all accounts, a restless soul. Over the last few years he had made a haphazard living skippering yachts for day-trippers or as an odd-job man in the quiet winter months. There was talk of Adam's partying lifestyle, his free-spirited take on life and his occasional bouts of depression and heavy drinking. The post-mortem found that Adam, a tall, well-built and seemingly healthy man, died of a heart attack.Ĭonjecture about his death continued, rumours swirling around the beachside bars and restaurants of the island. Initial police reports suggested that Adam, 41, had taken drugs and might have been on a suicidal binge following the end of his relationship with a long-term girlfriend, Janina, earlier this year. ![]() Next to him lay a discarded vodka bottle and an almost-empty bottle of wine. ![]() Adam, RD Laing's oldest son from his second marriage, was discovered in a tent pitched on private land, the floor scattered with the detritus of a drunken night. It was here, on this windswept rocky outcrop, that the decomposed body of Adrian's half-brother, Adam, was found by police 12 days ago. As Adrian speaks in a modest north London cafe near his Highgate home, the same paradox is being pondered by a handful of mourners gathering a thousand miles south on the Balearic island of Formentera.
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