Psychological Murder

Whether there is poetry or not, there is some harsh truth in the 1930 song hit You're Driving Me Crazy. Long experience with patients at Maryland's Chestnut Lodge, a private hospital for the mentally ill, has convinced Psychiatrist Harold F. Searles that "the individual becomes schizophrenic partly by reason of a long-continued . . . unconscious effort on the part of some person or persons . . . to drive him crazy." It would be inane to suggest that this is the only cause of the varied and complex conditions lumped together as schizophrenia, Dr. Searles admits in the British Journal of Medical Psychology, but it is frequently a factor.

There are many motives and mechanisms. Most striking motive, albeit unconscious, is "the psychological equivalent of murder . . . an endeavor to destroy the other person (for which there is no legal penalty). Also common, says Dr. Searles, is the need to get rid of "threatening craziness in oneself," achieved by telling another member of the family, "You're crazy." Most powerful of all, thinks Dr. Searles, is the utterly unconscious need to drive somebody else crazy so that an unhealthy state of mutual dependence can continue despite anxieties and frustrations.

As if in advance rebuttal of charges that such things cannot really happen, Psychiatrist Searles cites his own experience with a woman patient who seemed to be trying to seduce him while talking international politics. "Responding on these two unrelated levels," he says, "I found it such a strain that I felt as though I were losing my mind." In this case, sanity and psychiatry won.

Families of patients who have been in mental hospitals for a long time usually do not want them home, says Charles L. Rose in Mental Hygiene. On the social service staff of the VA Hospital in Bedford, Mass., Rose found from a survey that many relatives do not expect the hospital to effect a cure and really do not want it to--they regard it as a place of detention, not healing. They are more comfortable feeling that the case is hopeless: if the patient never improves, he can never be sent home where "there is no room" and the family's ranks have closed against him.

From the combination of Searles-Rose data, there emerges a family conspiracy not only to drive a man crazy, but also to keep him that way.

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