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.