Therapists at the Bar

Cartoonists and moviemakers have long endowed bartenders with the insight of amateur psychiatrists. Now, according to a report just issued by the Milwaukee Mental Health Association, several bartenders have intentionally given up their amateur standing.

In Milwaukee, nine black inner-city bartenders have completed an experimental program designed to give them elementary counseling skills and teach them how to show emotionally sick barflies the way to psychiatric clinics. The course of study, sponsored by the Mental Health Association, included discussions with social workers plus field trips to a storefront mental-health clinic and a center for rehabilitating alcoholics. According to the report, the program actually worked.

The bartender "graduates" agree.

Earl Cobb, for one, says the course made him a more understanding listener. It also gave him an idea for a technique that is probably unique in the annals of therapy: to encourage taciturn but obviously troubled customers to open up, Cobb brings his pet fox up from the basement. "A fox is not a very common thing," he explains. "People want to find out about it, so you start telling them about the fox and then they just start talking about their problems."

Cobb has become such a helpful listener that customers even telephone him at home for advice. Now that he knows how to recognize mental illness and has met a psychiatrist interested in ghetto residents, he sometimes tells a caller, "Hey, I know a fellow and I'll call him and you can just talk for a while. He's not going to lock you up, man, don't worry."

Besides helping them to help others, the course has benefited the bartenders themselves. A woman graduate who admitted she was once "the meanest barmaid in town" learned to be less provocative and more conciliatory. Recently she talked one patron out of shooting her husband and another out of wielding a knife in a fight at the pool table in her tavern.

Pleased with its experiment, the association hopes to launch two more training groups in March. One problem is money--which the organization hopes to get from a local brewery.

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