The Power of the Press

Howard Hall is the most closely guarded building in St. Elizabeth's (mental) Hospital, Washington. All its 175 patients are criminally insane. Many are paranoid: hostile, suspicious, frightened, withdrawn into their own delusions. Last spring one inmate suggested starting a newspaper. The doctors approved, and the Howard Hall Journal was launched. Last week, as the fifth issue of the Mimeographed monthly (grown from ten pages to 20) went to press, St. Elizabeth's called it therapeutic journalism.

One of the Journal's staff members is a former linotype operator who always wanted to be a reporter. He saw in the Journal a chance to achieve his frustrated desire, turned in enough material (mostly gripes about the hospital) to fill three issues. The editorial board of fellow patients suggested that he try gathering some hospital news. He became the paper's religious reporter. To the satisfaction of the doctors, he has begun talking constructively about his own problems--the first step toward possible recovery.

Another patient was under the delusion that his mother had been murdered by a doctor. Now a gossip columnist, he is beginning to realize that his delusion is irrational. Sometimes just reading the paper* has helped. A paragraph in the June issue jibed: "To ---- on Hall 7, are you still chasing spirits all over the place? Catch any?" Roused out of his seclusion by the taunt, the patient on Hall 7 explained to his doctor that he wasn't seeing ghosts as normal people think of them, but "seeing" the animosities of people he came into contact with.

Says Group Therapist Dr. Joseph Abrahams, taking a crack at carpet weaving and other traditional therapeutic practices: "What they're trying to do is to reach back toward society . . . The object is for them to learn to live with people, not with rugs."

*Sample joke: "I wonder why they always talk about a doctor practicing?"

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