Word: grovers
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Suicide Attempts. Miracle or no, Neurotics Anonymous, a nonprofit self-help program for the emotionally disturbed, can justly claim a modest success. It was founded six years ago by Grover Boydston, a Florida psychologist who, like all members, is generally known by first name only. N.A. now has 5,000 members in 250 chapters from Hollywood to Haifa. As with nearly everything else about N.A., the figures must be taken on faith. Noses are casually counted, and any member can open a new chapter of the group any time he cares...
...Grover, N.A. is the serene culmination of a misspent life: an unhappy childhood, five suicide attempts before he was 21 and a long downhill slide to alcoholism. Along this anguished course, Grover somehow earned a bachelor's degree in psychology from George Washington University. That and a therapeutic experience with Alcoholics Anonymous set him to thinking about applying A.A.'s principles to other fields of human distress...
...Neurotics Anonymous members are expected to refer their problems to a greater power, preferably but not necessarily God. To an avowed atheist, one of Grover's lieutenants proposed in all seriousness that an ordinary spoon could serve as a divine surrogate. Grover himself has even suggested that nonbelievers acknowledge the law of gravity as a higher power...
...Grover claims the same "cure" rate as A.A.-70%. In an exuberant mood, he will raise that percentage to 100%, arguing that "the program never fails for anyone who follows it." He can recite the usual dramatic case histories -like that of Elly, a housewife who joined N.A. after 13 years in futile psychiatric treatment. A few months later she filled a salad bowl with her collection of tranquilizers, sleeping pills and other drugs and flushed them all down the toilet...
...formal psychotherapists. Hence the program tends to attract people who want to believe that emotional problems are as correctable as a toothache-a comparison frequently drawn by N.A. members. "You have to keep going back to the dentist if you want to take good care of your teeth," says Grover. No one "graduates" from N.A., he adds, any more than the churchgoer graduates from church...