Mad Man

He had been a pretty hopeless drunkard since he was 18. In sober intervals, he managed to succeed as a poet and novelist. Married twice, he had sacrificed both devoted women, in turn, to his love for liquor. All the usual treatments had failed: psychiatry, mental hospitals, sanitariums, Alcoholics Anonymous. Knowin, that he was on the verge of insanity, and terrified by his hallucinations, he took a job as attendant in a mental hospital. That did it.

The chief actor in this story--a gaunt, red-haired Californian whose pen name is Harold Maine--last week published his autobiography (If a Man Be Mad, Doubleday; $3). It is a sobering account, not only of a drunkard's inner agonies, but of U.S. mental hospitals.

Medicine, thinks Maine, may be on the wrong track in its general approach to alcoholism and insanity. He suggests that doctors might get better results if, instead of allowing a patient to brood about his own madness, they focused his attention on some of the insane behavior of society. In Maine's case, his treatment produced a broad indignation that made him forget his own narrow craving for alcohol.

As a small boy in a California town, Maine recalls, he saw an inmate of an insane asylum taunted through the fence by a group of youngsters, until the inmate cried: "Come.on in, boys. They'll get you sooner or later." Haunted by this threat, young Maine never doubted that he would eventually be "caged." At 16, he ran away from home and his harsh stepfather. He became a bum and was first caged in a Hawaiian mental hospital. There he was greeted by a burly attendant who looked him over, observed: "We get it over with," and doubled up the new patient with a hard punch to the stomach.

The Bughousers. In every mental institution where Maine was later caged--private, state and veterans' (before Veterans Administrator Omar Bradley's regime)--he found attendants almost uniformly brutal and degraded. As one patient observed, they were mostly "yeggs, fruits, hopheads, ex-convicts . . . drunks, common thieves." They specialized in beating and choking patients without leaving telltale bruises. One whom Maine met "had a theory that all violent insanity was connected with the lower colon," and treated it with enemas. And attendants (who call themselves "bughousers") are responsible for at least 90% of the "treatment" given to patients in most mental institutions, says Maine. The institutions are invariably short of doctors and nurses; patients rarely get any psychiatric care.

As an attendant himself, first at a private institution and then at a huge VA mental hospital, Maine was so horrified at the treatment of patients that his own inner conflicts came to seem insignificant. He finally blamed the universal system of neglect less on attendants than on a public so indifferent that it would allow hospitals to be dark closets for storing the mental wreckage of modern civilization. When he quit his attendant's job to write a book, Maine was plenty mad--but not in a medical sense.

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