Word: psychiatrists
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Just as poetry can predict suicide, so it can also provoke it. That, says Psychiatrist Jack Leedy, president of the Association for Poetry Therapy, is one danger of the method in unskilled hands. Reading somber verses with upbeat endings can help unhappy patients by demonstrating that "others have been depressed and have recovered," but despairing poems may deepen the feelings of hopelessness. Psychiatrist Rothenberg cites another danger: poetry used only to get rid of intense feelings can keep a patient from understanding and resolving his conflicts. "Poetry by itself does not cure," he warns. But used by properly trained therapists...
Patients in poetry therapy are encouraged to read verse, write it, or both. The technique seems to be effective in both individual and group treatment, probably because serious poems usually touch on deep, universal emotions. According to Yale Psychiatrist Albert Rothenberg, a patient who suddenly deciphers the message of a great poet may experience a flash of understanding similar to the dramatic insight that can come to patients in ordinary psychotherapy. By writing an original poem, an inhibited, repressed person may tell his doctor much that was previously secret. Poetry, says Rothenberg, "is even more revelatory than dreams...
...with each other, and with most of the rest of the populace? They are conspicuously rational people doing their unlevel best to become less rational. In so doing they are playing out cameo roles in what Dr. David Cooper calls the "Madness Revolution." Cooper is another determined irrationalist, a psychiatrist who frequently envies his patients. Together with British Psychiatrist R.D. Laing, he has composed a sort of "power of positive nonthinking" -a popular ideology of madness. Works like The Politics of Experience (Laing) and The Death of the Family (Cooper) codify the I-hate-to-think assumptions all too visible...
...aesthetic creed. Some of the best, as well as some of the worst, novelists of the '70s are carrying out French Surrealist Andre Breton's definition of art as "a cry of the mind against itself." In Luke Rhinehart's The Dice Man, a psychiatrist systematically freaks out, illustrating the advantages of what might be termed "planned madness." In Briefing for a Descent into Hell, Doris Lessing suggests that madmen may be mankind's front-running mutants-the pioneers of "inner space," the avant-garde of a superior race to come. Even John Updike, a traditionalist...
Cobb has become such a helpful listener that customers even telephone him at home for advice. Now that he knows how to recognize mental illness and has met a psychiatrist interested in ghetto residents, he sometimes tells a caller, "Hey, I know a fellow and I'll call him and you can just talk for a while. He's not going to lock you up, man, don't worry...