Husband of the Patient

In a conference room at San Francisco's Langley Porter Clinic, half a dozen men sat around a table and talked, it seemed, about everything under the sun. Was it a good idea for one of the men to take his wife out to dinner soon after she came home from the hospital? Should a man take a job at lower pay, but with better chances of promotion? What is marriage really for, anyway?

Now & then one of the talkers appealed to the moderator who sat at the end of the table. He would give factual information, or suggest a line for the discussion to follow; never did he dominate it. If the talk seemed haphazard, it was planned that way. The conferees were the husbands of women who had been clinic patients because of severe mental illnesses (usually schizophrenia); the moderator was able young (30) Psychiatrist Gene Gordon, who wanted the men to talk out their problems for their own good as well as their wives'.

"Guilty as Hell." Last week Dr. Gordon told the California Medical Association that his experiment in group therapy, started last June, had been a success. Each week, from four to eight husbands had gathered for an hour and a half; in all, twelve had attended, including three engineers, three salesmen, a plumber, a postman, a bartender, an Army officer, an accountant and a chemist.

The main reason the husbands were there, says Dr. Gordon, was that, although they would rarely admit it, they all felt "guilty as hell--they thought they had helped to drive their wives over the edge." Group discussion, Dr. Gordon figured, might do even more good than individual talks with the psychiatrist.

A typical problem was that of the salesman whose wife had been discharged from the hospital but was still an outpatient. When she heard that her domineering elder sister was coming to visit her, she got so upset that she wanted to be readmitted. Dr. Gordon tossed out the idea that perhaps the salesman's wife wantec him to tell her sister where to get off Several husbands present thought this was a good idea. Finally, the salesman agreec to try it.

"Be More Forceful." "He girded himself up like Galahad," says Gordon, "and told his sister-in-law that his wife wasn't in shape to see her." His sister-in-law was furious at first, but stayed away; his wife calmed down, and all was well. Dr. Gordon told the husband: "Unconsciously, your wife wanted you to be more forceful. By being so, you've learned to understand her better."

The husbands' commonest mistake was in trying to coddle their mentally sick wives. They didn't want to discuss things that both they and their wives were worried about. Dr. Gordon eased them out of their oversolicitude. Then there was the problem of going out socially. One of the salesmen was scared to take his wife out to dinner with friends for fear somebody would upset her with a careless remark about "nuts" or "crazy people." Dr. Gordon convinced him that he should let his wife decide for herself. She did. They went out and had a good time.

Dr. Gordon reported no overnight cures for the wives, no dramatically rebuilt personalities for the husbands, as a result of the sessions. But both, he found, felt better. Time & again husbands told him: "If we'd only talked things over like this before my wife got sick, she might never have had a breakdown."

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