Waverly Hills

In a nutshell, there were these kinds of problems. First, a lot of youth problems. This is the late '60s [1960s]. This is the era of protests against the war [Vietnam War]. There were a number of young people who signed up for the [U.S.] Air Force. When you signed up for the Air Force, you signed up for four years. A number of young people did that to avoid being drafted into the [U.S.] Army, which was a two-year commitment, but could mean being shot at in a ditch in Vietnam, quite frankly (laughter). So, they signed with the Air Force. There, you were at least at the Air Force Base. And the Air Force has a different structure in terms of the--of how it works. In the Air Force, your pilots are officers. People who fly planes are officers. Your other people in the Air Force are what are called support troops. The primary mission is to keep the planes going so that this means that you're not going to be in a battlefield so much as a sergeant or whatever it is in the Air Force 'cause you're gonna be at the base involved in some aspect of keeping the whole thing going. So, some young people were savvy enough to realize this, that it was literally less dangerous for you if you were in the Air Force and got into the Air Force. However, for some young people, this meant four years. And a nineteen-year-old, nineteen to twenty-three, or twenty to twenty-four, can give many young people that this is taking some of the best years of my life (laughter). This is taking my youth, so you saw a lot of youth problems of people who are kind of sorry that they did it. Maybe it would have been better to take a chance to be drafted. Should I go to Canada, you know? I hate this war in the first place. We shouldn't be in it, so there were a lot of problems like that. A second set of emotional problems had to do with people who had been in the military and were on the verge of getting out of the military having done twenty years. And these were people who were often officers and they were now forty-five or forty-six. And if you didn't make certain promotional cuts in the military, you wouldn't get any farther. You would be just be discharged with some retirement pension perhaps. But in other words, if you were a lieutenant colonel, didn't make colonel, you were processed out at that twenty-year period. So, you couldn't stay on any longer, so this meant colonel so-and-so was going to a civilian world where you are Mr. so-and-so, and in your mid-forties. And they didn't know what was out there or whether or not they could make it in the "real world", so to speak.$$So were the--were you actually seeing people or were you doing more administration? Were you--$$No, I was seeing--I was taking care of them.$$You were, you were taking care--$$I was taking care of patients.$$Okay. So did you find that, that like on the colonel-level that they were like--I don't want to talk to you.$$Oh, no, no.$$You didn't have any of that--none of that?$$Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.$$Okay, okay.$$No, people who are emotionally hurting want to see somebody who might help them.$$That's true, that's true.$$So--$$That's true. But you hear some of these stories sometimes--$$Yeah.$$Okay. I mean you do.$You were explaining that you were doing your residency--$$Um-hm.$$--at New York State Psychiatric Institute [New York, New York]--$$Yeah, um-hm, Columbia [University College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, New York].$$--which is essentially Columbia University.$$Yeah.$$So you were saying and that, so you said that the focus was on, you know, the--I mean, what are the prevailing theories--$$Um-hm.$$--as you come out, you know, that are sort of prevailing terms of treatment?$$Um-hm, okay. Well, a lot of programs of that time were too tight. If you went to a kind of academic program that was university-based, and particularly, if it were a program in the East, there were, there were programs at say, Columbia, Albert Einstein [College of Medicine, New York, New York], where you largely worked with very ill psychiatric patients who were in the hospital a long time. And you had a cadre of supervisors who were training you in kind of psychodynamic methods. In this instance, they were usually psychoanalysts, so that I would say my own training had a distinct sort of dynamic and analytic focus. Partly because at that time, although we had some psychopharmacologic interventions available to us, there were three or four antidepressants. That was about it. There were several kind of medications that you could use in schizophrenia. That was about it. There were limitations in terms of what we could do. And in a training program like that, you certainly learn how to use those medications in an attempt to treat certain symptoms. But you were still very focused on, there must be some other sets of dynamic issues to explain why this person is presenting with the symptoms that they have. So it was really a combination, and heavily under an analytic emphasis. And for Columbia at the time, there was kind of always a message out there that the best of you in the residency will apply to the Analytic Institute [ph.] and become the best of psychiatrists. So that there was kind of the philosophy that if you really wanted a depth to understanding of things, you had become a psychoanalyst.$$Okay.$$And at the time, there's no question. It was probably the best education that we would term depth psychology, yes.