Part 2 of this meeting is the "rest of the story". You may find that it is a little choppy at times. Apparently the recording was not easy to hear so some words or phrases were missed, but you'll get the gist of it I'm sure. By the way, Dr. Low talks about this meeting as being the largest he had ever seen. I can only imagine what the "electricity" must have been like in that place! You can sense both the frustration and hope about how to get Recovery to those who needed it, who at the time were mostly in State Hospitals. We now pick up where Rev. Taylor introduced Father Dowling.
Fr. Edward Dowling, S.J.: I think if I had spoken first I would have said several of the salient things that Dr. Taylor spoke of. I got a letter the other day, [he reads the letter] this is Havana, Cuba, and I read it to let you know that if you get nothing more out of tonight’s meeting than the privilege of having given encouragement to a movement that is going to reach people, not in as populous as this, but in small places, I think our evening is eminently worth while. He says, “I am endeavoring to recover from a mental illness which commenced about one and one-half years ago. I have had electro-shock therapy a few months ago and at present take pills so that I can relax. I have tinglings in my hands and feet and scalp and have a number of other physical symptoms. I read an article in which your name was associated with Recovery, Inc., and I thought it might help me. Would you please send me a copy of the book and put the remainder of this ten dollars in the poor box. I am Irish, a Catholic, age 52, an accountant, married, and sometimes I have no hope at all. Once I tried to commit suicide but that phase has passed and now I pray, but I feel very depressed some days. Other days I feel pretty good, but I dread the next depression. God bless you and the work. As I am not in a position to attend the Recovery, Inc., meetings,” …my goodness, what it would do for him to stand where I am standing tonight and see what I am seeing. Dr. Low tells me this is the largest Recovery meeting in the history of the movement, as far as he has attended, and I think it is important that it happens not at the Center, but showing what a movement can do away off, far from the Central Office of Chicago. What can happen? Who knows, maybe some day in Havana… “do you think there is any member with more or less similar symptoms who might be interested in writing to me. Perhaps we could help each other.”… I remember when a member of my family entered a mental hospital. It was one of those ambivalent places, partly…(pause)…a sanitarium. I said, “Doctor, could this lead to insanity?” He said, “This is insanity.” There are people in this room who know how I felt; frightened, stigmatized, futile, poor. It was a bachelor uncle’s benefaction which enabled us to pay the hospital bill. Recovery, if I’d had it then, wouldn’t have made me feel so bad. The doctor used a big word. Professional people, the clergy and the doctors tend to do that. Someone…(Fr. D. chuckled)…in Recovery the other night was explaining the different types of cases that turn up and its simplicity is so typical of Recovery. Dr. Low, I think, has done something that no other professional man since Aristotle has done that I know of -- I don’t know them all. He has written a book without a professional word in it. Someone speaking of Recovery was saying, “There are two classes of problems. There is the class of problems of people who think that two and two make five, and they’re quite happy about that discovery; or quite belligerent and willing to maintain it. They don’t appear so often in Recovery. But there’s the other class who come in, who think that two and two make four, but they’re darned worried about it.” (audience laughed). You know I think…(pause)… My role here tonight is not to keep you from hearing Dr. Low…(pause)…but (Fr. D. chuckled) I assume my role…(pause)…I think I’m a decoy…(Fr. D. chuckled)…I think the Catholics of Detroit, and I speak with the permission of the Catholic authorities of Detroit, I specify that, they are quite interested, they do not know, they haven’t made a study of this enough to approve. In St. Louis, where I’m from, it works just the other way. We have a Catholic publishing house with a hall, not this big, but from that Catholic group, of the seven little groups that have broken off, one is at the Church of the Open Door, a Congregational church, and another is at the Webster Hills Methodist church, using halls. So that my role here I think is to…(Fr. D. chuckled)…say Recovery is safe. Well, I’m not going to go that far. All therapy can cause trouble, see. I don’t know if you read that story of the veterinarian who was explaining to this man how to give medicine to a horse. He said, “you take a gas pipe about two feet high and fill it with powder and then place it well down in the throat of the horse and then blow vigorously”…(audience chuckled). Well, about an hour later the farmer came back. He had powder all over him…(audience chuckled)… and the veterinarian said, “What’s the matter?” “Oh,” he said, “I’m dying. The horse blew first.” (audience roared with laughter). Now I have a suspicion…(Fr. D. chuckled)…that underneath the benign calm of even Dr. Low, sometime he must think…(Fr. D. chuckled)…that horse is going to blow first…(audience laughed). So, I do say this, disease is non-sectarian. In today’s paper, under an AP headline, is an item about a Nun, of the Order of Poor Clares, one of the most austere and saintly orders of women in the Catholic Church. This woman, gave her age on an insurance policy as 1894 when it was really 1891. It tortured her, and here in nineteen hundred and whatever it is, fifty-four, that woman, overwhelmed by the guilt of that lie told in the last century, poured kerosene over herself, soaked her robes in kerosene, and burned herself to death. Nerves cut across geographic, ethnic, and religious lines. There’s a two-way cut there, a rip-tide in that thing, the physiological and the sociological and the personal effects of moral deviations, even small, and so, I do feel, if the signposts of alienation from community which Dr. Taylor spoke of, alienation from group-mindedness, if those signposts are correct, we are not going to have less nervousness but more, and, as he himself has seen once before, in another group, the AA group, there is a Gulf Stream of hope that runs and courses down the life of our cities, whose trade winds whisper hope. I saw Recovery ten, twelve years ago for the first time. In the last four years I have had two members of my family belong and I have had a very fine opportunity not merely to watch the meetings, they occur in my building two floors below me, but I also have telephone conversations with these people. I have used it in my own life, I’ve used it with others, and I’m speaking especially to people who may be bothered by hardening of the dignity, dignal sclerosis, see…(audience laughed and Fr. D. chuckled). There are a lot…(Fr. D. Chuckled)…come on in, the water’s fine; menopause, hypertension, a lot of things that we never go to a doctor for. It can help. It can help. If the non-Catholic people won’t listen for a minute, I want to say something to the Catholics…(audience laughed)…I remember a Catholic one time who was an alcoholic. He was distinguished in a distinguished, alcoholic way…(audience chuckled)…and…(pause)…but he tells the story in Alcoholics Anonymous now. He said he always wondered if this Alcoholics Anonymous would do anything against his religion, see. It never occurred to him, he says, to bother whether this drinking and knocking lamp-posts down and ruining his family might hurt his own religion, see. There is less religion in Recovery than there is in Alcoholics Anonymous. Now, I suppose the majority in this room are Christians. Alcoholics Anonymous does not bring Christ in. You bring Christ in at your own discretion and at your own risk, see. Now Recovery, a good deal like things like the Red Feather and a number of other processes, does not bring God in, but Recovery is on the side of the angels. (At this point the end of Fr. Dowling’s talk is missing from the tape recording).
Dr. Taylor: You know, there is one thing that the Father and I agree on. We both accept Dr. Low as an authority. Now that doesn’t interfere at all with his accepting his Bishop and me accepting mine. Maybe you better not tell them that…(Dr. T. chuckled)…but anyway, it’s true. We accept Dr. Low as the authority. Of course, if I break my leg, I want a competent physician to fix it. I don’t care much whether he is Catholic or a Protestant or a Jew or a gentile or white or black, as long as he can do the job, and Dr. Low can do the job. Before I introduce him, I want to tell one little true incident. At one of the meetings up in our church, there was a little white-haired woman who kind of tiptoed in and sat in a back seat. She kept coming week after week, and after she had been in Recovery for two or three months, I noticed she was in church one Sunday. The second or third Sunday, she got nerve enough to sign the church register. I got her address and went down to visit her. She’d been a nervous patient for over twenty years and she told me that this was the first thing that had interested her during that whole portion and the first thing that she had been able to go to. I want you to notice, first she went to Recovery, then she went to church, then she went shopping, and then visited her neighbors; she got into one group after another, but the Recovery group was first. Some months afterwards, she dropped dead of heart failure. I had the funeral. I received a most beautiful letter from one of her sons in which he said, “Thank God for Recovery and for what it did for my mother. I hope you grow and grow and grow.” I hope she’s looking on tonight, and the man that started it was Dr. Abraham Low of Chicago. Dr. Low (applause).
Dr. A. A. Low: I have been privileged to establish and later to lead Recovery for now 17 years and I have held hundreds of meetings in Recovery and with Recovery members. I have attended parties, anniversaries, all kinds of gatherings in Recovery, and it should be the time now no longer to be overwhelmed by anything that happens in Recovery. I have about experienced everything that I thought was to be experienced, but tonight I am overwhelmed. I have attended big meetings, meetings that were crowded, as this meeting is, although, as Father Dowling told you, this is decidedly the biggest that I have attended. But you see, that means quantity, and quantity is something that Recovery hardly deals with. It’s welcome, and it is, even in this quantitative aspect, overwhelming to see a meeting of this kind, but the moment I entered this auditorium it was obvious there was not only quantity but also quality. Many of you came up to me, a good deal of them not knowing me, just having heard about me and perhaps recognizing me from a picture, and there was so much warmth, so much not expression but implication of loyalty. That, I must say, at home in Chicago, I am naturally not experiencing it in the manner that I can experience it here because in Chicago there grows up a familiarity between my patients and me and they don’t have to express anything. It is understood that they are, well, something like my children and naturally offer loyalty and devotion that we recognize and know and don’t have to express anymore. But when I notice the same sentiments here on the part of people that I have presumably never seen, never spoken to, I was touched, and when I entered this hall and noticed various indications of something that we call spirit…(pause)…after talking to a few of the men and women that I know, well, I was overwhelmed with the impression of this Detroit group because I knew a great deal about them without knowing the individual members, at any rate not all of them, and not too many of them, and I felt that I came home to my, well, to my most effective child, the child that is extremely devoted and the child that has displayed this devotion and loyalty, well, all I can say, in a most successful manner. All of our groups are devoted, all of our groups are loyal to Recovery, but there is something about this Michigan group that is not well expressed by calling them successful. I mentioned the term and I wouldn’t have mentioned it, but what this term success means here, with this group, is perseverance, undauntedness. There is a quality of fearlessness about this Detroit group, and there are representatives here of the other groups in Michigan, so I can speak of Michigan and not only of Detroit, and it is on this occasion that I would like to make a simple statement, a statement that in Recovery we have loyalty of those that are taken care of, of those that are given leadership, towards their leader, and now comes the point to which I wanted to work up. What is truly overwhelming here in Detroit, in this Michigan and Detroit group, is the type of leadership that you have been happy to enjoy in my dear friend, Treasure Rice. I am very grateful to her for what she has done here in Detroit to further the cause in which we are all interested and of which I have had the great happiness to have been the pioneer. My speech that I was asked to offer here tonight has been titled “What Recovery Can Offer.” Well, that’s a large order. If I want to speak on what Recovery can offer, then I am afraid you will not be able to go home tomorrow morning yet…(audience laughed). That’s too large an order. I shall take the liberty of changing this title of the speech and I will want to speak to you about “Some Techniques Which Recovery Has Offered”, and true to the Recovery tradition I will do as my patients do when they meet in Recovery gatherings. I shall bring you examples; at any rate at first I’ll bring examples. About several weeks ago I was called over the phone and there was a gentlemen I knew, a distant relative of his had been my patient and I had the opportunity to meet this gentleman and he called me and, well, he spoke to me. He was literally panting, naturally with anxiety, and he told me that his daughter came home, trembling, shaking, teeth chattering, and deathly pale, and he said he would like to see me immediately with his daughter and he couldn’t tell me over the phone what precisely had happened, but he was greatly worried about the situation and then the father with his daughter arrived at the office but I did not have time to see him. I had the waiting room full of patients and I told him immediately I don’t know whether I can serve his daughter today satisfactorily but I will try my best and when I had this young lady in my office she presented me with the following story. She was a college student, and while she was sitting in class that afternoon, all of the sudden she felt a dreadful sensation coming over her and within a second or so she felt that her abdomen was freezing up and the upper part of her body, the chest, head and the extremities were swept by a heat wave and so were the lower extremities. Picture to yourself this situation. In the middle of this woman’s body there was a deep-freeze you might say, and above the abdominal region and below it there was a heat wave coursing through the parts of the body. In other words, that person was split into two portions, the one being hot, the other frozen. I must tell you I have seldom seen a patient that described her case in this manner or experience in this manner and the few patients that I have seen that presented a similar picture were indeed deathly pale as the father said, convulsed with fear, and I can well understand that this must be the psychological reaction to this splitting up of the body into two portions. Well, I didn’t have time and what could I have done anyhow? In former days, this means before I had Recovery, let me say twenty years ago and perhaps even seventeen years ago and fifteen years ago yet, this means at the time when we either did not have Recovery or when the Techniques were not yet fully elaborated, and about twelve years ago, for instance, we did not have the techniques that we dispose of today. In those days, twelve, fifteen and twenty years ago, when I had reached quite a position in the profession already, in those days I would have immediately insisted that the patient go to a hospital. I wouldn’t have dared treat such a patient in my office. I wouldn’t have dared let her go home, and then she might develop a condition that was far more dreadful than it was on the afternoon that I saw her, but when I saw her those several weeks ago I immediately had made up my mind that this girl would not be sent to the hospital. Instead, I did something that naturally I could never have done twelve, fifteen and twenty years ago. I sent her over to Recovery just two blocks south of where I have my office, and there she was taken care of and got relief that afternoon; relief, she was not cured yet. Now look here. If a girl has such a condition, then it’s inevitable that she becomes fearful in the extreme, she has to develop a panic and once a patient develops a panic then there develops a vicious cycle, and the more the patient becomes aware of his panic the more does he become alarmed about the panic, in fact, a fear of the fear, a vicious cycle that develops from this circular condition in which fearing the fear, or let me say being alarmed at the panic makes the panic worse and if the panic gets worse then the alarm about it gets worse and so there develops a vicious cycle in which the alarm whips up the panic and the panic whips up the alarm and the patient is simply distracted to a degree that she cannot possibly be left at home. She must be constantly watched and preferably behind locked doors. She might at any time do something to herself, and this will give you immediately one of the differences between my private practice twenty and fifteen and twelve years ago, and my present practice in which, as you now realize, I am enabled to do things that I could never have done in former days and the thing that enables me to do these things is the fact that I can now send my patients to Recovery. I will want to explain this situation to you in another fashion. You see, when I sit in my office and the patient sits opposite me and I try to reassure the patient…(pause)…Now that patient that I saw that afternoon was not in an ordinary fear. She was in fear of instant death, of instant death, and if I sit down opposite her and try to reassure her, well, I can only use words, nothing but words. And words are powerless when there is a vicious cycle between panic and alarm, but when she comes to Recovery just two blocks south of my office she arrives there and she does not see a doctor. Now you will naturally not understand what I mean by that. She will not be taken care of by somebody who will merely use words, and perhaps gestures, and friendly looks, I grant you all of this, but essentially words, and when the patient sits opposite a doctor who uses words, the words are pale when it is a matter of the fear of instant death. No words can give reassurance in this situation. Twenty years ago this patient would have been hospitalized and we would have had one first-admission to the hospital in this case. Today I avoid, in cases of this kind, the first-admission in an astonishing number of my patients that I would have immediately sent to the hospital in former years. The patient listens to the doctor if he can, in a panic. But even if he is not in a panic he listens attentively to the doctor, he still has great difficulty to be reassured by what the doctor tells him. You see most of the patients, especially if they are in a panic, have of course given up hope, and if the doctor reassures them and tells them, well, that’s not a serious condition and I can take care of it, the patient immediately thinks, “Well, what else can a doctor tell me. The doctor is of course not going to tell his patient that he is going to die. If I have a dangerous disease, the doctor will not tell me the truth, it would be against his ethics, “ and most likely it would be and I, for one, if I dealt with a patient in a dangerous sickness, I would not tell him, “Well, you have only so and so long to live.” I would not do it. I know that some doctors say that should be done, but I would not, and that’s what the patient thinks, the doctor cannot tell him the truth, otherwise he would run afoul of his Hippocratic oath, if he would. And so the patients come to us doctors, to us psychiatrists, and they come naturally to us usually as chronic patients, some of them as acute panics as in this case, but most of them come to us after two years of suffering, five years of suffering, ten years of suffering, and at that time they have made up their mind that they cannot be cured any longer, they become hopeless and they are helpless and if the doctor tells them, “Well, I’ll help you. I’ll get you well again,” the patient thinks, “What else should the doctor tell me. Naturally he will not tell me I am hopeless and incurable,” but the patient thinks he is hopeless and incurable either in an acute panic or after he has gradually drifted for ten or five years or shorter or longer into a chronic psychoneurosis or a nervous condition. In Recovery that patient is told nothing. No words are used in exchange with him. He is merely asked to sit down and listen. He is not spoken to when he comes for the first time and that method…(pause)…that was the method that I wished to secure that afternoon for this patient. She was not to be spoken to during a meeting or during the visit in an office. Instead she had to listen and what she listened to was a very simple thing, as simple as all the techniques of Recovery, Incorporated, are. There was a patient at the table sitting together with about fifty or sixty other patients, and one patient gave what is called in Recovery an “example”, that patient gave an example of how he or she had developed a severe fear, or rather severe symptoms and thereupon severe fears, and thereupon the heart began to palpitate (here the tape recording is hard to hear for a few words)…but then he remembered what he had learned in Recovery. He remembered that he had been trained in Recovery to think of these nervous symptoms and he instantly knew from the training that he had imbibed, that nervous symptoms, no matter how threatening, no matter how distressing they may be are never dangerous, and while my patient of that afternoon was listening to another patient describing her panic that she suffered on the street and while my patient went on to listen to this report, it dawned on my patient that here was a case similar to her own and there this person, this panel member, had demonstrated to my patient that I sent over that afternoon that the most dreadful of fears can be controlled by a certain technique and that that panel member that had given the first example that my patient listened to had precisely produced that control or that remedy of her fear that my patient was just now suffering from and was so deadly afraid of it that she had drifted into an extremely severe panic. My patient had feared that she was going instantly to die and the panel member reported a very similar story that happened to her on the street and will you understand that this panel member did not talk to my patient; she reported a story to anybody who would want to listen and not to my patient particularly and the patient was not spoken to, she was merely a casual listener to a story coming from somebody who was not at all interested in talking to this patient, she didn’t know her, and you see the difference now between what I do without Recovery when I see a patient in my office and what the Recovery people do without me. I talk to the patient as an official and the patient feels that I am interested in keeping the truth from him, the patient feels that I want to sell health to him and then the patient develops what psychiatrists have called “resistance”, and they all develop resistance. Now we can call it, and we do that in Recovery, “sales-resistance”, because the patient feels the doctor wants to sell him health and the patient develops the sales-resistance, but when he comes to Recovery there is no salesman of health, no doctor to try to convince him the patient that she is mistaken in thinking that she is going to die, and I hope you understand now the basic principle of Recovery action. There are no professionals at the panel meetings, nobody that speaks officially. There are only people that tell stories, stories about themselves, not about the patient that sits at this corner or that corner, and the patient listens passively without suspicion that somebody wants to sell him a bill of goods, and what goes into your ear passively has a great tendency to sink in. When it comes passively to your ear then you are not skeptical, unless you are told a tall story, but if you are simply listening to a report of somebody who gives an instance of his own experience without any reference to you, then this…(here the tape recording is hard to hear for a few words)…to the brain and has an excellent opportunity to sink in there, while, when the patient is faced with the physician, he offers resistance, he becomes skeptical, and the story may enter the ear but it has hardly a chance, or hardly a good chance, to be settled in the brain…(pause)…another great difference between what a physician can do in his office and what Recovery can do in meetings. Reverend Taylor and Father Dowling mentioned one thing that is so remarkable about Recovery; I doubt whether anybody can be in Recovery for some length of time, let me say for a day or two, without forming friendships with somebody. And if the patients stay on for weeks and weeks, don’t they find a second home in our organization. That’s not my words. These are words that I continually hear from patients and I tell you what that means. You see, if this patient had been treated in my office alone, well, that patient would not have come back to my office unless the father dragged her to my office and she would not have come back to my office because she felt that she was going to die instantly and so she wanted instant relief, but in former days I would have told her, “Well, sit down and I’ll explain the situation to you”, and I would have talked to her for an hour and what much can you tell in an hour if you begin to explain what a fear is, and especially if you go into details as the academic professor does, and I was a professor at that time and I was academic. You see, it takes months and months in ordinary office practice ‘till one gains an improvement, not a cure, and you know the psychiatrists have to spend endless numbers of hours until they see some initial results, but the patient in panic will not wait endless or dozens of hours ‘till he will get relief. That patient may do something very desperate and in the days when I did not have Recovery a patient like this had to go to the hospital for shock treatment otherwise I would not take care of him, and be certain that I am not the only one who did that. Everybody, as far as I know, did that with such a patient. You see, Recovery prevents first-admissions to the hospital, I don’t say that we do that in every case but in large numbers, by giving instant relief, not a cure, but relief. The patient is now likely, and in most instances certain, to come again because he got relief, and then to come again then to come again, and so in Recovery we can wait ‘till the patient gets more relief, more improvement and finally is being cured, whatever a cure means. In private practice we can’t do it because, if the patient comes in a panic or in a marked anxiety, he will have to wait ‘till we are ready to give him substantial relief, he will do something or he might do something, desperate and therefore we don’t dare let the patient go home in a condition of a panic, of a panic of a kind that I have described, and we demand that the patient of this kind should go to the hospital and there is our first-admission and they should be prevented wherever that can be done and Recovery has as its one objective, to prevent first-admission; the second objective is to prevent relapses after the patient has had his first-admission, then improves, goes home, and then is threatened by the relapse. I will not describe to you how Recovery prevents the relapses, but I hope you will realize there is the distinction between the first-admission to the hospital, and Recovery’s method of prevention of first-admissions, which was explained to you. There is the relapse after the patient has returned from the hospital, and that’s the second objective of Recovery, to prevent relapses. I could explain to you how such relapses come to pass, but time does not permit me to go [into] some techniques employed by Recovery.
Now, you would say, well, if that is so, if Recovery can prevent first-admission in large numbers, and relapses, although I have not described it but you, I hope, you will believe me when I tell you that we have prevented relapses, again in astonishing numbers, then you will presumably ask, if that is so, well, the State hospitals are precisely looking for methods of preventing relapses, and, if they could, for preventing first-admissions, and here Recovery has gone on for seventeen years and has not one single workshop in any of the State hospitals, and, you may ask, how is this possible. Well, I can’t go into details, but I want to tell you that in 1949 the first state in the Union approached me and asked me whether Recovery could be introduced into the hospitals of that state. It was the state of Iowa, and the Director of the Department of Public Welfare in Iowa was very eager to have Recovery Techniques introduced into his hospitals and he immediately wired me asking whether he could come to Chicago and confer with me and I naturally consented immediately and Dr. Graves, he is still Director of the state hospitals of Iowa, came and he attended one meeting of Recovery and that was convincing. He saw the method that they needed in the state hospitals of Iowa. The man is a gentleman, who seems to have an abundance of energy and enthusiasm, and he left Chicago and within a few days I received a letter from him asking me whether I could help him introduce these techniques in the state hospitals of Iowa. He had been so inspired by what he had seen and heard that he thought it would be a great neglect of duty not to bring these techniques to the benefit of his patients and the State of Iowa began in the right fashion. They immediately sent an employee to Chicago for training in our techniques. That employee, an occupational therapist, went back to the Mt. Pleasant Hospital, the largest hospital in Iowa, and she started groups, Recovery groups, and they worked remarkably well and one day I received a message from Dr. Graves in writing me to come to Mr. Pleasant and a representative of the Governor would be there and Dr. Graves himself, and I came, naturally, and we inspected the work done and we were greatly elated over what this occupational therapist had done for the hospital and for the Recovery patients, and, we drafted plans to get these techniques introduced in all the other hospitals of Iowa and everything was arranged down to minute details and that was the last I heard of it, and it was broken off; there was no more continuation of it. No explanation was given to me and I wish to tell you Dr. Graves did not do that. He was for the project, but somebody, I don’t know who, was against it, somebody obviously in power, that’s all I can tell you, and I was discouraged, but after all, I thought, “Well, we’ll try again.” In 1953 there was an auspicious opportunity in Illinois when a former associate with me gained office, I would say a deciding power, in the Department of Public Health, Public Welfare and I went to the gentleman and told him, “why don’t you introduce Recovery in the state hospitals of Illinois” and he said, “Well, I’ll be glad to do it” and he did and he did it in good faith, there was no question about it, and he acted promptly and there were two psychiatric aids sent to Chicago for training, naturally by the state, and they were inspired by the noblest enthusiasm. After a week they came back to the Mantego State Hospital, started their groups, and they flourished and then the project was dropped and I was not told about it. I was not given any explanation. It was simply dropped. Some people that had power obviously obstructed that project. It was not a man in the State Administration. They went ahead and did what they could to get the project started, they wouldn’t have dropped it. Some other people dropped it, I can’t even tell you whom I suspect or which kind of people I suspect. That’s not for me to say. Then I received a notice from our dear Treasure Rice, that was last year, telling me that she saw the Governor of the State of Michigan and the Director of the State Hospitals and she wanted them to introduce Recovery techniques into the state hospitals of Michigan and the Governor directed the Department of Public Welfare or whatever…(pause)…the Department of Mental Health to send somebody to Chicago to investigate and later I was invited by the Mental Health Commission to meet with them and tell them about Recovery and now I must say, the State of Michigan was quite honest and decent. They didn’t start the project, therefore they didn’t drop it…(audience laughed)…Well, I like an honest procedure, whether it is against my work or for my work. I don’t say that the other States were dishonest, I don’t mean that, but somehow or other they acted in a manner that was not just gentlemanly like, it seems to me, and now you may ask, what is to be done about this situation. We produce a type of work that is so badly needed by the tens of thousands of patients that pine away in the state hospitals, and we have definitely demonstrated to anybody who wants to see that we have the method for preventing relapses and preventing first-admissions, and the state hospitals, whom we have petitioned again and again, and who in two instances proved themselves that the work can be done by them, in Illinois and in Iowa, and the state hospitals just let the patients pine away and die away while so many of them could be saved, not all of them, don’t misunderstand me, but so many of them could be saved with our method. Well, I have nothing to say in point of answering the question which I asked, but, in 1951 when I noticed that I could not get through the wall that surrounded me, I gave up, although later as I told you in 1953 I took up again. At that time I was determined that I had failed in my effort to get the state hospitals interested in our work and we called a convention in Chicago and the men and women from the various states came to Chicago and I declared to them that I will now turn over this issue to the organization, that means to the patients, and let us see what the patients can do in the matter of expansion of Recovery into the state hospitals and today three years later I must say the patients have done much more than I could do. What I did ended in failure, but the patients, especially here in Michigan, have expanded to such an extent and have created a spirit of such magnificence that I count especially on the patients in such centers as Detroit, in Louisville, in St. Louis and wherever we have branches, that they will, indeed, solve this problem of finally freeing and liberating the thousands and ten-thousands and perhaps one-hundred-thousands of patients needlessly sacrificed in hospitals, and I am particularly hopeful now because we have with us now a fairly significant number of churches, at present in two localities only, in and around St. Louis and in and around Detroit, but this has just started, except for St. Louis that has started four years ago, but in Detroit this movement has just started about a year ago or nine months ago. But it seems to me what you, our patients and guests here, and the public in general will have to do and will have to be aroused to, is the realization that it is a grave injustice. I don’t want to use a stronger term, gravest injustice, to have help for a great portion of suffering humanity and refuse to offer it. Thank you. (Applause).
Dr. Taylor: I think we have a couple of minutes that we could allow any questions from the floor, but before that I want to make a couple of announcements. In the…(pause)…just outside this door there are some books, which were mentioned by the Father, Dr. Low’s book on “Mental Health Through Will-Training”. They are five dollars each, or you can get some copies of his News that are bound in booklet form for two dollars, you can get those as you go out. Now, any theological questions you can ask…(audience laughed)…of the Father. Any psychological questions you can ask of Dr. Low. If there are any other questions, I’ll dodge them…(audience laughed)…Is there anyone over here would like to ask a question of Dr. Low or the Father before we dismiss. Anybody in this section over here? Yes.
Questioner: Can a schizophrenia case be cured by this?
Dr. Low: Well, that question cannot possibly be answered. One would like to know what kind of a case it is, and one would like to know various details and of course this cannot be taken up here. I’m sorry that this question cannot be answered.
Dr. Taylor: Question here. This man is just back from Chicago.
Questioner: This is sort of new to me. I guess I’ll probably have some nervous symptoms up here too, because this is the first time I’ve ever really faced a large audience like this, but, to get to my point, I’d like to explain a little what Dr. Low’s Recovery training has done for me. In the last four years I have been sick, on and off; most of my trouble is deep depression. I guess I had times where I was in bed two or three months, kept right in bed with my nervous symptoms and I really didn’t know how to handle them at all, that’s what compelled me to stay in bed that long, but through Dr. Low’s methods now I know how to handle myself more and to handle these nervous symptoms when they do arise and I feel very fortunate that I was able to go to Chicago and receive this training. It has helped me a great deal already. I haven’t been in Recovery too long, but after I got into Recovery the first day I guess I began to put it to use immediately and, as Dr. Low explained tonight, it can give you some immediate relief, not an immediate cure, but it can relieve you a great deal. Well, I think I better get back to…(pause)…I was supposed to ask a question, I didn’t want to talk too much, there isn’t much time for questions, so, Dr. Low, I’d like to ask why are the psychiatrists against Recovery…(audience laughed).
Dr. Low: I would like to remind you, Jerry, that I am a psychiatrist myself…(audience laughed).
Jerry: Excluding you.
Dr. Low: Let me tell you I don’t know whether psychiatrists are against Recovery. I don’t know who obstructs Recovery. I have my suspicions but I will not speak of suspicions. If I say I don’t know, this means I have not the kind of knowledge that one can make public. I have only suspicions. I will tell you that I have tried to get men that have influence over state hospitals and I know them because I was once one of them who had influence over state hospitals, and I was unsuccessful and if you ask me why then I wouldn’t tell you because I have only suspicions. I think that my suspicions are well rounded, but who am I to judge. I am naturally biased in this question and so I will not mention mere suspicion. That’s all I can tell you…(audience laugh).
Dr. Taylor: Judge Jeffries used to have a story of a little boy that was fighting out in the alley and his father called out the window and said “Stop fighting”. He said, “But he called me a name”. He says, “That’s nothing.” He looked back a little bit later and they were fighting again. He says, “I told you to stop fighting”. “But Dad, I got a nickel under my foot and he’s trying to get it”. Now whether some people feel that this self-cure might interfere with their fees in the office I don’t know, but I always look for the nickel under the foot…(applause)…Are there any questions down here?
Questioner: Dr. Low, may I ask is this Recovery a substitute for psychoanalysis or is it a supplement?
Dr. Low: Well, I am loathe to speak about persons and groups. I only spoke of hospitals and that’s neither person nor group, that’s an institution. Well, the answer to this question I have given partly, or in good part, in the preface to my book. There I mention something.
Dr. Taylor: One question over here.
Questioner: Dr. Low, would Recovery help nervous people as well as nervous patients?
Dr. Low: Now this question I can answer with an unequivocal yes. No doubt. I mean there is no doubt in my mind and in my experience that the average adult person who is always nervous in our culture, I have yet to see any of my neighbors, or members of my family, or friends, co-workers, doctors, lawyers, or ministers and priests, that are not nervous. I don’t mean jittery, I don’t mean shaking, but nervous. I am nervous, I am not as stolid as I should be, I am not, and whatever people see in me that connotes steadfastness is relative, and very relative, and a good deal of it is mask, successful mask I hope, and the mask helps a lot. If you wear a good mask this means you control well, and that is a great help in controlling tenseness. A nervous patient naturally mainly suffers from nervous tenseness, and there are very few people in a metropolitan environment that can avoid tenseness, and these tense people every once in a while produce severe symptoms. I produce them every once in a while myself, and very frequently mild symptoms. The difference between us, you and I, and the long term nervous patient, is that with the nervous patient the tenseness and the symptoms are almost continuous, and with us they are intermittent, and another distinction perhaps is that the nervous patient develops frequent, enduring vicious cycles, which the average person does not, and so I think I am entitled to say that both the nervous person, the average person, and the nervous patient suffer practically from the same thing, but in different degrees, and so it should be assumed that this technique would cover both fields. (At this point the tape recording ends, which was just about the end of the meeting).
