Tocsin for Mental Health

...This book is a "must" for anyone with the slightest interest in his fellow man...

...The annual incantations of the psychoanalysts, with their ritualistic excommunication of the devia-tionists and their Sacred Bulls quoting obscure sentences from the pen of Sigmund the Master, appear to me now as remote and fantastic as the practice of the Black Mass in the Middle Ages...

...They accuse us of a lack of appreciation of the subtleties of the research mind, of the intricacies of medical education, of the tenuous nature of the therapeutic process...

...Gorman's attack on it is unjustified...

...To date, a second group has not been formed because those who believe the old national organization ineffective do not want to see two national organizations competing for public support...

...There is an unconscious: that much even the most die-hard organicists will accept...

...because it means an end to what we normally call "will...

...He also says that some may feel there is an undue emphasis upon money...

...The body and the mind do not have to be played against one another: both are part of the whole...

...Nevertheless, the book contains a fair share of "hot adjectives...

...But this criticism, to quote Gorman's last paragraph, "pales in the light of a major necessity—we must create a powerful national voice for those who are unable to speak for themselves...

...As the title points out, every other hospital bed in the United States is occupied by a mental case...

...Gorman explains in his preface that he has foregone much personal opinion and wherever possible used documentation from general medical, psychiatric and official sources...

...Psychoanalysis is part of psychiatry and, many believe, the most important part in terms of accomplishing any "cure...

...Reviewed by Lucy Freeman Author, "Fight Against Fears'' "Hope for the Troubled," "Before I Kill More" Mike Gorman, a New Yorker by birth, spent four years in the Army, then went to work as a reporter on the Daily Oklahoman in Oklahoma City...

...He says: "I am cheerfully prepared to be read out of the Inner Temple by the High Priests of the Oedipus Complex and the rampant Id...

...Some of my sophisticated psychiatric friends recoil at tables and charts pointing up the financial malnutrition of psychiatric research or the shortages of psychiatric personnel," he says...

...Yet, psychoanalysis has proved the only method that we know, for certain, helps the mentally ill...

...Came the money, came the men,' he says...

...It takes a long time, with much work and patience required on the part of both psychoanalyst and patient, but Chestnut Lodge in Maryland, the Mennin-ger Clinic in Topeka and the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, among other places, have shown that the one technique that permanently aids the emotionally troubled is for him to face some of his fantasies with the help of the psychoanalyst...

...Public Health Service, which has undertaken what is probably the largest medical research program in the world...

...For that, perhaps drugs or shock are sometimes necessary...

...Every person who is interested in bettering the mental health of the nation owes Gorman a great debt for his long and diligent lobbying for increased appropriations and new legislation, and for writing this book, which shows us clearly where we stand today in our attack on our Number 1 health problem...

...If Gorman and some others could ever accept the idea that each of us...

...in his mind, creates the weird fantasies that, in their acting out, ore mental illness, they would perhaps give up the most fantastic notion of all?that some magic drug or surgical procedure will be devised to shock or lull the illness away...

...Gorman is to be admired for the way in which he points up the nation's mental-health needs and the way in which he castigates lethargy, as Albert Deutsch did in his earlier Shame of the States...

...to return the very mentally ill to a world of reality, so that they can hold a job and live with their families...

...Why, Gorman asks, do we not spend more for research, for improving the living conditions in our mental hospitals...

...Because psychoanalysis cannot be accepted by everyone is no reason to dismiss it with curses, as Gorman docs...

...If the new president, F. Barry Ryan Jr., and the new executive director, Richard P. Swigart, can convince the board, "still weighted down with too many guardians of the past, that it is absolutely vital to inaugurate democratic working relationship with the state societies, they will have performed a feat which none of their numerous predecessors was able to bring off...

...Aroused by the tragic conditions in state mental hospitals, he wrote a book, Oklahoma Attacks Its Snake Pits, and became the nation's first newspaperman to receive the Lasker Award of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene...

...He questions whether there should not be established a new, powerful national mental-health organization...

...For a number of years, I was an active communicant in that Temple, cocking an attentive ear while its psychiatric theologues concocted a witches' brew of sterile terminology to describe psychiatric phenomena they had no capability of treating...

...He describes the typical state mental hospital of today as "an anachronism, a vestigial appendix of earlier superstitions...

...He says: "It is still incredibly isolated from the main stream of American medicine...

...The story of this unconscionable isolation forms a sorry chapter in the history of American medicine, and I, for one, am not possessed of enough blessed charity to exculpate the many practitioners of the medical arts who knew better but turned their backs on their sick brethren...

...Spokesman thus far has been the National Association for Mental Health, which Gorman says has not lived up to its responsibilities because of a weak board of trustees...

...It is important, as Gorman says...

...We have temporized long enough, and we have forgiveness enough to ask of our brothers who are tormented in mind...

...Comments Gorman: "I accuse them of living in a cream-puff world of fantasy...

...But let us not fool ourselves: This is only the start...

...If such a thing happens, heaven help us...

...rained upon those Gorman feels are holding back progress in mental health...

...Gorman is a crusader, a writer with wit and candor, a man to be respected...

...He must find a psychiatrist and go to him and learn how to unearth the unconscious problems that have caused his illness...

...If the person wants to guarantee that he will not fall ill again, he has work to do...

...He points to the U.S...

...Gorman predicts that "unless the national organization pulls itself up by the bootstraps and moves strongly into the public arena in the next year or two, it will sink out of sight" and a new organization will take its place...

...He will have nothing to do with psychoanalysis...

...Attempts to reduce complicated problems to simple, pragmatic levels within the comprehension of the many offend their highly developed sensibilities...

...Today, he is executive director of the National Mental Health Committee, with 46 state Governors as his honorary chairmen...

...Its plea is just and eloquent...

...But his book would have been stronger had he not attempted to set the organic approach against the psychological...