Mental Self-Help

Can an emotionally disturbed individual pull himself up by the bootstraps of his own will power? Indeed he can, according to Abraham A. Low, a Vienna-trained anti-Freudian psychiatrist who settled in Chicago in 1922. To show how, Low wrote a book called Mental Health Through Will-Training and founded a psychotherapeutic self-help organization called Recovery, Inc. Until after his death in 1954, Low's behavior therapy was professionally unpopular in the Freudian-dominated American psychiatric world, but today it has come into its own, and Recovery, Inc. is thriving.

In meetings of the organization's 912 chapters, held once or twice a week, victims of emotional disturbance read aloud from Low or listen to tape recordings of his heavily accented voice: "Things go on, inside you and outside you. We do not discuss emergencies or catastrophes--how often do they happen? We discuss daily life and nothing else. Daily life is something we should be able to deal with satisfactorily. I want you to distinguish clearly between outer and inner environments and the attitude you take. The attitude is yours! It can be changed, improved, omitted, manipulated. Events cannot. The only thing you can do is take an attitude that will not increase discomfort."

After such hypnotic homilies have been played through, the patients testify to the degree of their redemption. At a recent meeting a nattily dressed businessman told a group at Chicago headquarters: "This morning I met a man I used to work with, but it was obvious that he couldn't remember my name. I spotted all the symptoms of fear in me--the pounding in my head, shortness of breath, stomach muscles tightening. But I regarded them as just average symptoms. I even chatted with the man for several minutes. I endorsed myself because before Recovery, I would have lasted only a few seconds and then rushed to the nearest bar to get drunk."

Like AA. Like most Recovery, Inc. meetings, this was a highly structured affair, with a solemn, inspirational tone reminiscent of Alcoholics Anonymous. But just as the twelve-step credo of AA, which would turn off a normal social drinker, has real significance for the man who has faced the horrors of dipsomania, so the ritual of Recovery, Inc. is acceptable, perhaps necessary, for many who have gone through the hell of emotional breakdown.

After the businessman had "endorsed" himself (a piece of Low jargon meaning to give oneself credit for one's efforts), other patients recited incidents in accordance with the organization's strict formula: 1) a brief description of an everyday event that precipitated a recent emotional upheaval, 2) an enumeration of the symptoms aroused, 3) an explanation of how the member himself dealt with them, and 4) how Recovery helped. Every recital is designed to accentuate the positive.

When Low started Recovery in 1937, it was exclusively for former hospital patients, and he ran it with imperious authoritarianism. Since his death it has been run by dedicated disciples. Adherents now number about 7,000, pay $7.50 a year in basic dues, but many nonmembers attend meetings, usually held in schools and other community buildings. Group leaders are not professionals--who seem remote and austere to many patients--but are themselves former mental patients.

The organization has no better testimonial to its usefulness than the experience of its Chicago-based director of leader training, Phil Crane, 64. His law career was cut short by paranoid schizophrenia, and he had more than 90 electroshock treatments. After that, Recovery. "It taught me self-help techniques," Crane explains. "I'd wake up, panicked that I would again become mentally ill and have to go back to the hospital. So I'd practice what Low called spotting, which is simply learning to recognize that these are only nervous symptoms--distressing but not dangerous. I then practiced the Recovery technique of commanding my muscles to lie quietly on the bed until the symptoms gradually diminished."

Like many former patients, when he met old friends Crane would feel self-conscious about having been hospitalized for mental illness. According to Low's specific instructions, Crane "practiced 'averageness' by commanding my muscles to make me walk up to my friend, then shake hands, smile, and chat for a while. I proved to myself that I could look at my past mental illness in the same way I would look at pneumonia or any other physical illness."

Recovery, Inc. does not try to diagnose emotional disturbances, says Crane. It cannot handle acute psychotic episodes. It does not compete with professionals: many of its members go concurrently to psychiatrists or other therapists. About half of its clientele are suffering from the residua of severe, hospitalized illness; the other half are neurotics with chronic problems that make it difficult for them to cope with the frustrations of everyday living.

Freudian analysis downgraded the importance of willpower in dealing with such difficulties; Abraham Low may have put too much emphasis on it. But the members of Recovery, Inc. are proof that some will power, at least, plus mutual aid, enables them to cope. "There is nothing wrong with our character," Lucille Asmussen, a recovered psychoneurotic, told her group recently. "We have been inflicted with an ailment, and we have to endorse ourselves as often as we can. After all, no one is going to send us a get-well card."

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