Snapping
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Experiences such as these made a deep impression on Prizant as she continued her psychiatric training, and she grew disillusioned with the impending future she foresaw as a psychiatrist.
"I had a helpless feeling of not being able to do anything," she remembered. "I got tired of having no time to enjoy life. I got tired of being tired. I became very aware that the kind of care that is taught as standard psychiatry in medical school is not available to most people in this country. They just don't have the time or money. I began to feel that it was a social injustice to train psychiatrists who would simply go out and open offices in the suburbs and see people who are nice, healthy, ambulatory neurotics."
It is that class of ambulatory neurotics, according to Prizant, which is now being attracted to mass-marketed therapies. Those therapies, in her opinion, offer no solutions to America's mental health problems.
"I have serious questions about the validity of a lot of the things people are calling 'therapies,' to begin with," she said. "On the whole, I think they're irresponsible. They are tampering with dangerous areas of the mind. On the other hand, if positive changes do occur, you really don't know what to attribute them to."
In the course of her training, Prizant had seen numerous victims of mass-group therapies. She described their reactions in such traditional terms as schizophrenic, paranoid, psychotic, and delusional. She recalled one case in particular.
"There was one woman from est," she said, "who came into the day hospital for six months after she took the training. She was paranoid and delusional. She believed that est had somehow infiltrated her body and everyone else's body. She was projecting all kinds of things."
When we asked her about the cults, however, Prizant confessed that she hardly ever came upon cult members in her psychiatric work. As we had been told, few of them ever manage to break free of their cults and seek help on their own. Prizant recalled treating cult members frequently back in medical school, however, not in regard to their mental health but for physical conditions.
"I remember one Krishna woman I had on my rotation on OB-GYN [Obstetics and Gynecology]. She was about eight months pregnant and eating no protein. She was, essentially, living on orange juice," Prizant said. "I remember my incredible sense of rage -- not because of what she was doing to her own body, but at what she was doing to that unborn child. I felt a sense of injustice."
As we talked about various cult and mass-therapy techniques, Prizant told us that many of the rudiments of those group techniques are now part of every young psychiatrist's basic training, a remnant of the wave of experimentation that nearly overwhelmed her profession a few years back. Today, however, they are taught as necessary tools.
"There were several group experiences for first-year residents," she said. "We had one group experiment in regression designed to teach the participants about authority, leadership, and responsibility by blurring the boundaries between individuals in an intense group setting. It was supposed to teach us about ddensive projection -- putting your feelings onto someone else, not knowing where that person begins or where you begin -- but if you ask me it was actually an experiment in group psychosis."
In this particular group situation, she said, many of the young psychiatrists found themselves unable to maintain their professional detachment. Despite their training, some proved to be no more immune to the impact of group techniques than many cult members or mass-therapy participants.
"One member of our group became quite regressed," said Prizant. "He was incessantly giggling, and the group consultants made a fairly dramatic intervention at that point to reintegrate him. In another group, some people did become psychotic and began acting out fantasies outside the group, driving the wrong way in traffic and things like that."
Prizant reported these reactions without comment. When we turned to her own response, however, she admitted that she too found the ordeal trying.
"I wasn't quite sure how I was supposed to extrapolate that experience to what happens when you're leading a group and one of your patients starts projecting things onto you. It was an interesting experiment, but one I wouldn't repeat. The next day I had to fly back to Chicago to see my fiancé, and I found it very difficult."
As we talked about the various forms of sudden personality change we had encountered among cult members and group participants, Prizant brought a new one to our attention, one that she found particularly alarming: the change she witnessed in her colleagues over the course of their three-year training.
"You really can't see the forest through the trees until your third year of psychiatry," she said. "Then it's very interesting to watch the third-year residents interact as a group and with other people. Everything is analyzed to the nth degree; everything gets discussed in terms of the jargon. Very subtly, they learn the rules of the game -- how you are supposed to act when you're a psychiatrist."
For several years, Prizant has watched the young professionals in the classes ahead of her march down similar paths to secure and lucrative private practices.
"There is a definite trend among third-year residents to go scurrying around finding all the nearest offices in the wealthy suburbs and trying to take their hospital patients out with them," she said. "There seems to be an inverse correlation that develops between a psychiatrist's amount of training and his social responsibility."
Prizant admitted that she found the trend to be particularly dismaying, but she sympathized with those who got caught up in it.
"I'm not sure why it happens, except that, quite frankly, you get very tired of putting off everything -- financially, emotionally, experientially -- in order to become a doctor. So when you finally make it, everything else kind of goes by the wayside. A lot of us went into medicine for noble reasons, we wanted to help people, but it's very difficult to hang onto your humanistic ideals."
Prizant shook her head. It sounded to us as if she were doing a fairly successful job of steering her own course through her training, but she claimed that she, too, was struggling to contain that type of personal detachment she views as a specific hazard of her trade.
"Psychiatry definitely changes you as a person," she said, with more than a hint of sadness. "You become desensitized to people. I learned very early in medicine that if I identified with my patients to the extent of thinking, 'My God, this could be me or my mother or my grandmother!' I would soon go bananas. You can't function with that kind of mental set. And when you go into psychiatry it becomes even scarier, because what you're dealing with is not objective. When you're treating neurotic patients -- the obsessive compulsives, the hysterical personalities, the people who feel super-depressed and want to kill themselves -- you're dealing with a patient population you could very easily become part of. Psychiatrists are all pretty much neurotic; to go through medical school these days you have to be sort of neurotic. There are reasons why our divorce and suicide rates are so high, but you just have to turn yourself off to it."
To counteract the effects of psychiatry on her own development, Prizant told us she was taking positive steps to make sure she stayed personally and socially responsible. She was assuming an active role in the Southern California Psychiatric Society and working toward a master's degree in public health. Her current goal, she said, was to forge a career for herself in health-care planning, avoiding the pitfalls of private practice altogether.
"We're not all money-mongers," she said confidently, "and we're not all aloof. I'm trying to safeguard myself from becoming that way by seeing things from their broader perspectives."
At the end of our conversation, Gilla Prizant smiled warmly and told us to be sure to call her if she could be of further help. Touched by her views, we left with a new sense of respect for psychiatrists like Prizant who have managed to remain committed before the onslaught of their profession, and we felt compassion for those whose own prestigious careers contain elements of the kind of emotional detachment we had come to recognize as a symptom of snapping.
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Another psychiatrist was quick to point out that no serious practitioner in his profession can compete with a cult leader or mass-marketer who offers "instant cures and easy answers." With the proliferation of nonprofessional therapies and the increased demands of government agencies, insurance companies, and other "third-party payers" for tangible results, psychiatry has been forced to resort to such concrete methods as drugs, he said. Yet, like the nation as a whole, the psychiatric profession seems to be emerging from a period of adolescent boldness into one of more restrained realism, and today's young psychiatrists are among the first to call for caution.
"A psychiatrist has no easy answers," one new practitioner told us. "I can't make any guarantees. I'm a doctor, not a messiah, and all we can do is our best."
9 Beyond Brainwashing
"At Panmunion the American imperialists and their running dogs and
lackeys, the British capitalist ruling clique, are holding up the peace
talks. In the imperialists' prison camps they are torturing, starving and
killing the Korean and Chinese prisoners, but we will remain calm and
will never torture or kill you. You are safe with us. We shall always
self-consciously carry out the Lenient Policy and thus shall continue to
give you the chance to study and learn the truth, and see how your
leaders are catching the people in a web of lies and preparing to extend
the Korean conflict and unleash a third world war."
-- Commandant, POW camp in Korea, 1954
(quoted in a British chaplain's account of his imprisonment)
While the mental health community was grappling with the consciousness explosion, the "critical situational response," and the changing picture of mental health in the nation as a whole, the appearance of the cult syndrome with its total transformation of personality posed an added and unwanted challenge. Sudden personality changes had been taking place in American religious circles for decades, but they had been practically ignored by the mental health field, first because they posed few legal or social problems but also because religion and psychiatry, like church and state, had traditionally refrained from crossing into one another's territory. With the rise of the cults, however, and the growing legal concern for the constitutional rights of cult members, the mental health community, with considerable caution and reservation, slowly began to examine this bizarre form of personality change.
For the past few years, a group of about a dozen professionals around the country -- psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers -- has begun to acknowledge that what is happening to America's cult members is something new. Their tiny, loose-knit, fledgling organization, Return to Personal Choice, represents the first professional attempt to understand the cult experience and aid cult members in need of treatment, and what these professionals are being forced to admit is that their tools of analysis and treatment are inadequate to the task.
In 1976, Dr. John G. Clark, Jr., a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital and a member of Return to Personal Choice, testified before a special committee of the Vermont State Senate investigating "the effects of some religious cults on the health and welfare of their converts." In his statement, Clark cited the known health hazards, both physical and psychological, and noted that point beyond which his profession has been unable to go. Said Clark:
The fact of a personality shift in my opinion is established. The
fact that this is a phenomenon basically unfamiliar to the mental
health profession I am certain of. The fact that our ordinary methods
of treatment don't work is also clear, as are the frightening hazards
to the process of personal growth and mental health.
In their efforts to account for this new kind of "personality shift," Clark and a number of other professionals have turned to the only body of research that relates to the phenomenon: the various inquiries conducted by their colleagues into the way the human mind responds in situations of extreme duress. Several decades ago, this topic took on national urgency with the discovery of extreme examples of sudden shifts in belief, behavior, and personality which came quickly to be identified with a process known as brainwashing. Since the celebrated trial of Patricia Hearst in 1976 and the widely publicized court verdict in early 1977 in which five members of the Unification Church in San Francisco were released in their parents' custody to be professionally deprogrammed, the media, the courts, and the general public have seized upon this term. Few people, however, realize its limited applicability to the wide range of sudden changes in personality taking place in America today.
The word "brainwashing" was first introduced into the popular vocabulary in the early 1950s. Then it served as a vivid explanation for the technique that had been employed by the North Koreans to extract allegedly voluntary confessions of war crimes from U.S. airmen downed in the Korean war. When it was first brought to light, this new, uncanny, and sinister method of inducing personal change seemed to have sprung out of nowhere, having no comparable tradition in the West and no apparent foundation among the ancient rituals of the East. Threatened and intrigued, the U.S. government supported a number of research projects aimed at unraveling the mystery.
Of many early studies of brainwashing, the most widely recognized is that of Yale psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, who was among the first American doctors to examine victims of the process, both soldiers and civilians. In his book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, published in 1961 (a comprehensive report on studies published earlier in professional journals), Lifton analyzed the method of brainwashing as it was developed by the Communist Chinese during their political takeover of the mainland in the late forties. From his essentially psychoanalytic orientation, Lifton described the various physical and emotional stresses used by the Chinese to induce feelings of "guilt anxiety" and create a condition of "ego-destruction" in their subjects, after which they proceeded to "re-educate" them in accordance with the principles of Chinese Communism. In his book, Lifton described the process as one of "depersonalization" accomplished by repeated attacks on the individual's sense of self, overt death threats, and complete control of the surrounding environment, followed by sudden reprieve -- lenient treatment in return for full cooperation. He wrote about the traumas individuals suffered in the symbolic terms of "death and rebirth" associated with the confession of past wrongdoing and reindoctrination and even noted the familiar "thousand-mile stare" that often characterizes brainwashing victims.
Lifton's work is significant and important, yet it demonstrates the limitations of his Freudian underpinnings and lexicon. His phrase "ego-destruction" connotes the sweeping impact of the brainwashing process on personality, but his analysis offers little insight into the mechanics of the process by which the Chinese affected the minds of his research subjects. Instead, his theory proposes a complicated explanation based on deep-rooted unconscious factors, where simpler and more accessible answers would suffice.
A more concrete approach, in keeping with recent trends in psychiatry, has been to seek medical answers to questions of brainwashing and "personality shift"; for although psychiatry can say very little with certainty about how brainwashing affects the mind, it has discovered a great deal about how it affects the body. The physiology of both brainwashing and religious conversion is now a well-established and extensively documented subject of medical inquiry. The acknowledged expert in this field is British psychiatrist William Sargant. In
his seminal work, Battle for the Mind, published in 1957, he explored in detail the role of intense physical experience in bringing about sudden changes in religious and political belief. In support of his argument, Sargant cited his own work with battle-weary soldiers during World War II, research in psychotherapy using drugs, electroshock, and neurosurgical methods, and experiments on laboratory animals, to draw an elaborate picture of what happens to the central nervous system during rituals of brainwashing and religious conversion.
Sargant addresses questions of more immediate relevance to our investigation. His book sheds light on two distinct sets of physiological factors that may be involved in the creation of spiritual or revelatory experiences. The most common techniques produce states of overexcitement in the nervous system, which, according to Sargant, can be accomplished by means of drumming, dancing, singing, praying, or "by the imposing of emotionally charged mental conflicts needing urgent resolution." Sargant identified these techniques in the black masses of voodoo tribes and the dances of Sufi whirling dervishes, as well as in American religious practices such as those of the Shaker dancers of Connecticut, the snake-handling Christian sects of Tennessee, and the fiery preachers of Evangelicalism. His second analysis is nearly opposite in every way, declaring that the sensation of enlightenment or newfound awareness may also be produced by practices that, in effect, reduce or inhibit the activity of the nervous system, such as fasting, meditation, and other forms of sensory deprivation. Sargant noted the common use of these techniques among practitioners of Eastern religions.