Answering a Cry for Help
BROOKS, THOMAS R.
Answering a Cry for Help Reaching Out: Helping Young People in Trouble By Brendan John Sexton and Patricia Cayo Sexton Agathorn. 248 pp. $8.95. Reviewed by Thomas R. Brooks Author,...
...And their book is no less a guide for community-oriented curative programs than an analysis of the affliction, offering "approaches which work for many young people and which lay people can deal with...
...To counteract so profound an alienation, they insist, we must "reconnect with each other," form "groups that matter," and build "closer communities and stronger neighborhood communities...
...Addiction in Harlem tripled between 1961-62 and 1967-68...
...Not many are blessed with such insight...
...And they add, "Groups often sound as if they were collecting evidence to prove someone guilty of transgressions against his own mental health," seeking "indictments...
...And the major portion of their book is rich in the ways of reaching out to troubled young people, of helping them to help themselves...
...Chicago claims 30,000...
...It is terribly important to be cautious even while confident, to try to be certain that it is we-and nobody else-who will pay for our education...
...So addicts-of drugs or alcohol-are likely to remain with us, and their habits are a cry for help...
...The new school that is coming to be called 'encounter therapy,'" the Sextons caution, "is also developing its dogma...
...It would be a community that connects us, not to a system of hierarchial structures like those of Freud's day, but to people and to a system of alliances and trusting relationships with people (and even to occasional 'enemies,' since there will always be people with whom we cannot get along...
...It was easy to poke fun at the hyped-up predawn raid that bagged 35 alleged drug peddlers and users, 10 pounds of marijuana, one pound of hashish, an unspecified number of "narcotic implements," 2,000 pills (pep pills, prescription drugs and vitamins), a 38-caliber pistol (actually a toy), a kazoo, and three dried prunes...
...and various experts agree on 100,000 for New York City...
...Illicit drug sales, like everything else, are thought to have been somewhat depressed lately by the economic depression, but there are signs that troubled youngsters are turning instead to alcohol, both cheaper and legal...
...The drug life-style offers a great many 'answers' to the problems of adolescence: meaninglessness, alienation, lack of respect, lack of challenge, lack of excitement, lack of things in which to succeed...
...But not to the Sextons, who maintain, "Our industrial society is alienating to almost everybody...
...Heroin provides immediate, even "lasting" happiness, assuming you can maintain your supply...
...That is madness...
...a place where we can find friends and have fun, but which we are free to leave if we choose...
...Now that sounds to me like a fair description of America, at least middle-class, pluralistic America...
...a community with an expanding variety of roles and careers to choose from...
...Reaching Out is a response to that cry...
...the crime rate did not...
...Drug abuse, the authors show, frequently originates in the difficulties of growing up...
...Wisely, the Sextons do not claim the Encounter approach is the only solution, but they have convinced me that it works as well as, if not better than, most...
...Reviewed by Thomas R. Brooks Author, "Walls Come Tumbling Down: A History of the Civil Rights Movement" Seven years ago, just about the time Brendan John Sexton was deep into the Greenwich Village drug scene and struggling to get out, I wrote an article about a famous "bust" at the State University at Stony Brook, Long Island...
...Over 30,000 addicts and abusers are now in New York City treatment programs alone...
...some sense of values, but not tyrannically imposed...
...Brendan John Sexton, director of program evaluation at New York City's Addiction Services Agency, and Patricia Cayo Sexton, his stepmother and a professor of sociology at New York University, take drug abuse seriously...
...Where Reaching Out does go astray is in the lessons it offers "far beyond the field of drug abuse...
...They also see drug abuse as symptomatic of a social disintegration so vast that "what we're doing is equipping a spiritually undernourished mankind with the weapons it needs to destroy itself...
...Fortunately, the Sextons possess a good deal of common sense that saves them, for the most part, from sociological cant...
...Reaching Out is at its best when it cuts close to the bone, describing from practice what serves to rehabilitate drug-troubled adolescents...
...Sexton adds what she terms "some feedback and interpretive responses" plus "shape and organization...
...As for the number of persons taking other drugs, perhaps only pill sales figures offer a clue...
...Looking back, I now have a good deal more sympathy for the police who, while heavy-handed, were nonetheless trying to grapple with a problem that the rest of us took lightly or seemed determined to ignore...
...As with any social process, however, there are dangers...
...Association with an addict or a group of users almost inevitably results in a youth turning to drugs...
...Increased addiction is associatec in the popular mind with increased crime, yet no real proof exists for the correlation...
...I'm skeptical for many reasons, but chief among them is my belief that the multiplicity of "communities" also leads to immobilization, to to frustration, to alienation...
...But indictments, the Sextons warn, are inimical to the Encounter method: "Integrity in this business means the humility to understand just how complex and sensitive each of us is, how difficult it is to talk, to understand...
...Since his companions are crucial to a teenager, the idea of co-opting the entire peer group into the cure was a happy stroke on the part of Encounter's founders...
...Still, a lot of people, mostly young people, are hurting...
...One of its holy tenets is that you deal with someone who acts defensively by smashing him, humiliating him, or manipulating him by promoting guilt feelings until he cuts it out...
...Evidence suggests users of hard drugs tend to be centered near sources of supply: A University of Southern California student task force concluded that some 50,000 heroin addicts live in Los Angeles...
...a Harvard student group estimated 5,000 in Boston...
...It achieves its goal of speaking simultaneously to older and younger generations in large measure, I think, because of the rather unusual nature of the collaboration: The voice is Brendan John Sexton's, drawing upon his experience in founding and ultimately directing Encounter, a nonresident therapeutic community for youthful drug abusers...
...No one has precise statistics, but there is little doubt about the subsequent rise in addiction...
...That fundamental notion was reinforced by encouraging the young people to reach out into the community-to participate in local affairs, find a job, get an education, and so on...
...We need, the Sextons declare, "some third thing, a community with which we can identify but to which we do not have to conform absolutely...
Vol. 58 • June 1975 • No. 13
