Behavior: Mental Self-Help

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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."