I was twenty-one and in one of those spaces life sometimes bring. College was behind me and I was living at home in Chattanooga for the last time, though my childhood friends were by then scattered to the wind. One weekend, I drove to Memphis where I would be be entering medical school in the Fall to find a place to live, or maybe just to get a visual of what was up ahead. The space between those cities through the cotton fields of northern Alabama and Mississippi was as empty as my summer. I’d spent my life in the mountains of East Tennessee and didn’t know the world could be that flat with that much sky showing. It felt too close to the sun. I might as well been on a trek through the Sahara with all the heat in that summer of 1963 creating mirages on the road ahead.
Though I’d lived in the segregated South all my life, being in Faulkner country for the first time and having watched Martin Luther King’s dream speech the week before, it all felt different – everything. It wasn’t the wonder of new experience, or even the boundary between youth and what follows [which it was]. It was a reshuffling of the deck, how I saw the place of my life. And it wasn’t a good feeling, nor was it clear. It stayed with me after returning home. Then a couple of weeks later, one morning I read about the bombing of the 16th Street Church in Birmingham killing four little girls, and it became all too clear – and things were never the same for me. I turned from sympathizer to activist by the end of the article.
Medical students don’t have as much time for involvement in the world of social change as others, but I was as involved as I could be, and my new wife took up the slack. When it came time to settle down, we came back to the South and enrolled our daughter in an integrated public school, living out our adulthood in a place changing slowly before our eyes. Watching Obama’s inaugurations has been surreal for me, getting to see something I could never have imagined happening in my lifetime back in that summer. I can only describe my feeling watching it fifty years after MLK’s dream speech, the death of those children, and Medgar Evers assassination [that same summer] as awe – awe that things can actually change so fundamentally, albeit a work in progress.
I’ve seen the same thing repeatedly in long psychotherapies – a point along the way where there’s a session or a day where things change, perhaps only apparent in retrospect. And it may take a long time for that change to ripple through and be felt widely in the patient’s life, but one can know with a growing conviction that it’s going to happen. I’m writing about that here because I’ve had individual conversations with a couple of you recently and heard your discouragement, and heard it in the comments here and on other blogs – an angry disillusionment about all that has been so very wrong in psychiatry. So I wanted to say that I don’t share that gloom, and my earlier story is why. This is just what change usually feels like, lumbering along like an old plow horse long before breaking into the sprint of a young stallion.
A good blog, thank you, sending me back to Raleigh, summer of 1963, 20 years old, off a bus from New York, on my way further south, aware of crossing the Mason-Dixie line, having read about segregation, yet unprepared.
I crossed the line any private owner of any business was allowed, as I just did not see the signs telling people their designated places. I found myself in the middle of a crowd, in a dark room, when everything all of a sudden felt strange, the place falling quiet, people turning their heads, staring…Further inside people were sitting at tables, eating in a well-lit section. Whites only. I was among black people, dim, standing room only. No one spoke. I got out and ate my meal on the backporch steps in company of an elderly, black man who had the presens of mind to see that I felt lost. He gave me a crash course on ingrained discrimination and unspoken of hypocrisy in white America. I think that friendly man gave me the impetus I needed to get on a bus to Washington DC a few weeks later, August 1963, an experience I also could not forsee, but I’m grateful for to this day.
The Swiss-German therapist Arno Gruen wrote in a book, The Fear of Autonomy in Man and Women, of what we call progress, that may be just tearing down one church to build a new one, our own, in its place.
I guess the struggle for equality and justice for all is neverending, as I think Eli Wiesel is warning of, when he speaks about what may happen again if/when good people opt out of the fight. I think that ‘s what happened to psychiatry.
In Norway responsible people saw , smelled and heard but did not speak out. It took a young doctor, a conciencious objector from the military, coming from the outside to work at Reitgjerdet. He was horrified. He helped one of the inmates of that asylum to escape. The good people are still asking themselves, 34 years on, why they did not alert the government , but were silent accomplices till the scandal erupted.
Segregation could not be “reformed”. It had to be abolished. Bio-psychiatry cannot be reformed, the followers of Emil Kraepelin’s church of unproven suppositions stand exposed.
Well, I would like to say that I had great experiences with single and group therapy in college that helped me to overcome a lot of issues that I discovered are common, and to chip away at some major issues until I was finally able to overcome. I appreciate very much that psychiatrists and psychologists assisted with my liberation, which is why I so disappointed when suddenly I was being told that I should start taking an antidepressant first to “make therapy work better”. I had embraced the hard work of therapy and saw it as necessary to the task. Had I known I had an iron deficiency when I thought I was depressed, my life would be quite different now. But since time only runs one way, I can just hope that I can convince others to get a physical before seeing a mental health worker, to go to do some research on drugs before taking them, to consider other avenues to wellness, and to not internalize a diagnosis.
Wise words, Wiley, should have been obligatory to get et physical first, and do research on drugs before taking any, be helped to discover that most issues are common.. If i may add one tenet, never tell a mental health pro of family members given diagnostic labels. Some jump to conclusions. Skipping the hard work may lead to grief..
An afterthought: Researching what can be known about drugs before taking any is a long shot that dr Ben Goldacre has been into for quite some time in his Bad Science columns in the Guardian, then a book, another one coming soon. The frauds in Big Pharma have made it hard to prescribe too, for doctors aiming at doing good, not harm