Psychiatrists From The United States

"Among elderly Urantians who knew Sadler, several legends have taken shape about miraculous ways in which some UB documents came into Sadler's possession. Instead of being written or spoken by Wilfred, then typed by a secretary, it is claimed that Sadler once wrote down some questions and put them in his desk drawer. The next day, to his astonishment, the questions had been mysteriously replaced by answers. … It is said that Sadler checked the handwriting against the scripts of those in the Contact Commission and the Forum. There were no matches."

"After examining all of the evidence, the conclusion that makes the most sense is that Sadler was the channel for The Urantia Book. No other person was present, led the group, had the skill set, or spoke about being connected to the cosmic mind as Sadler."

"Harold Lawrence McPheeters was born in New York City to Harry Halstead and Ethel Louise (Brush) McPheeters on March 10, 1923. He died Thursday, January 14, 2021 in Snellville, Georgia. Harold was married to Phyllis Merrill for 58 years. She died in October 2010."

"Dr. McPheeters, who lives in Louisville, was appointed commissioner in January 1957 by former Governor A. B. Chandler and reappointed by Governor Combs last February. He came to Kentucky April 1955 as Assistant Commissioner of Mental Health. He had been assistant psychiatrist in a Schenectady, New York hospital. Besides his state job, Dr. McPheeters is an assistant professor of Psychiatry at the University of Louisville. A native of New York City he was educated in the public schools there, then attended the University of Kentucky. He holds a B.A. from Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania and an M.D. from the University of Louisville School of Medicine. In connection with the U. of L. School of Medicine's Department of Psychiatry, he was a resident for three years in Norton Memorial Infirmary. He served in the U. S. Navy as a psychiatrist from 1952-1954. He has published two articles in the Journal of the Kentucky State Medical Association, one about state hospital discharge procedures and another about psychiatry. Dr. McPheeters, 37, is married and has four children."

"The occupation/profession that uses a blend of primarily psychological and sociological theories and skills in preventing, detecting, and ameliorating psychosocially dysfunctioning people and in helping them attain the highest level of psychological functioning of which they are capable."

"A psychiatrist who has been dubbed the father of Human Services. Dr. McPheeters was born in 1923 in New York City and grew up in Garden City, NY, where he attended local public schools. He graduated from Lafayette College in Easton, PA, and then from Medical School at the University of Louisville. He was in the Army Specialized Training Pro-gram during World War II and then served as a medical officer in the U.S. Navy during the Korean conflict. His residency training in psychiatry was also at the University of Louisville. He is board certified in Psychiatry and is a Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. He served as Assistant Commissioner and then as Commissioner of the Kentucky Department of Mental Health from 1955 to 1964 and as Deputy Commissioner for Program Administration of the New York Department of Mental Hygiene, 1964-1965. He then moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where he served for 22 years as Director of the Education Board, an interstate compact organization of the 15 southern states dedicated to improving higher education and services to the people of the region."

"Prohibition, whether of the use of alcohol or anything else we may want or wish to do, will never develop in us or any people self control, a sense of social responsibility, or the ability to make wise choices for ourselves."

"One of the most difficult things the doctor and teacher have to do is to blast the popular and ancient delusion that there is an instinctive preparation for parenthood; that because a husband and wife produce a child they are mysteriously endowed with perfect wisdom concerning the nurture and development of this child."

"Our great teacher, Elvin Semrad, actively discouraged us from reading psychiatry textbooks during our first year....Semrad did not want our perceptions of reality to become obscured by the pseudocertainties of psychiatric diagnoses."

"[Account of a psychiatrist trainee undergoing routine psychoanalysis by Semrad:] Semrad motioned to me to sit in a straight-backed wooden chair....He entered copious notes as I spoke. From time to time he'd look up at me from his writing....To my left and behind me was his analyst's couch, upholstered in tight pink plastic imitation leather....Semrad asked me to tell him about myself, and I began relating my life story-- who I was, or thought I was, and where I was from. When he'd look up from his writing, he had an expression of profound understanding and respect. I got deeper and deeper into my story. Occasionally, Semrad would interrupt with a question to clarify what I was trying to articulate, but otherwise I continued pretty much on my own, except for his occasional glances up in silence. At one point, I had been talking about my father and our relationship, which in many ways had been painful and strained....Semrad looked up and with a profound look simply said, "Your father has been very important to you." I started to sob....I began my analysis with Semrad the next day and went four days a week. There was not a session that was not profoundly moving, and my life in many ways changed dramatically."

"By talking with patients about "what really matters to them," based on their experience, he tried to help them see that they were avoiding before going to what they were avoiding."

"When a resident [physician in training] once asked him what helped build his capacity to help people bear intense feelings of loneliness and loss, he replied, "A life of sorrow, and the opportunity that some people gave me to overcome and deal with it.""

"He sat side by side with patients so that he could look at the world from their view, turning only his head towards them."

"A central prerequisite of Semrad's method was offering enough support so that the patient could relinquish avoidance defenses and thereby share the pain."

"At his approach, it is told, the beside-themselves would find themselves, and the nonsense-talkers would begin to make sense. You've never heard of him ...because he wrote no books, gave his name to no large theory. His words live in an oral tradition. His teachings cannot be taught: They can only be embodied."

"[Semrad was] a rumpled, roly-poly Father Christmas. It was like talking to your grandfather-- who is finally listening to you, for a change."

"[Regarding what to say to a patient:] We all have the same question and problem, and I follow a very simple rule: if it's comfortable for me to say it, then it is the right thing, the right time, and the right way to say it."

"Patients who appeared very psychotic became in their contacts with him understandable human beings."

"Never idealize anybody: They all stink."

"My main interest is to kibbitz and learn."

"We have three choices in life: to kill ourselves, go crazy, or learn to live with what we have in life."

"Sorrow is the vitamin of growth."

"You have to respect his [the patient's] adulthood. To do this you have to treat him with respect and approach him on his highest level of function. Don't take away from him what he has, or you'll foster regression."

"Very shortly, you will be going onto your assigned wards. Within those wards, you will see over fifty of the sickest, craziest, most bizarre people you will ever encounter. They will be hallucinating, gesticulating, and delusional in the most grotesque ways. Every cell in your body will rebel and want to block out the experience. But here is the thing you must remember. Every one of those symptoms, as strange as they may seem to you, makes perfect sense to those people. Every single one, has been evolved and carefully crafted, to try to deal with some impossible family situation. Every symptom represents an attempt by that person to adapt to the hand that fate has dealt him. You are to regard each one as an artistic, creative endeavor to survive. Your job, and your only job, is to appreciate, and admire that effort!"

"With paranoid patients, he emphasized the need of a patient to find someone who could share the responsibility for the unacceptable feelings, including acknowledging the "kernel of truth" in the patient's delusions."

"[When asked:] "Dr. Semrad, does the patient have manic-depressive illness or schizophrenia?" Semrad answered, " I would call the patient Mr. Smith.""

"When you feel loved, you don't have to be crazy."

"Therapy is therapy-- talking to the patient about what matters to him, no matter at what pace he can take it... As long as you take the position of talking to a person about what matters to him, then he can feel secure. Someone cares enough and is concerned enough about him to work with him and listen."

"I think the issue of sex-change for males is no longer one in which much can be said for the other side. But I have learned from the experience that the toughest challenge is trying to gain agreement to seek empirical evidence for opinions about sex and sexual behavior, even when the opinions seem on their face unreasonable. One might expect that those who claim that sexual identity has no biological or physical basis would bring forth more evidence to persuade others. But as I’ve learned, there is a deep prejudice in favor of the idea that nature is totally malleable. Without any fixed position on what is given in human nature, any manipulation of it can be defended as legitimate. A practice that appears to give people what they want—and what some of them are prepared to clamor for—turns out to be difficult to combat with ordinary professional experience and wisdom."

"This intensely felt sense of being transgendered constitutes a disorder of ‘assumption’—the notion that a person’s maleness or femaleness is determined by feelings or behavior rather than by anatomy."

"Psychiatrists and other mental health professionals should employ modes of assessment that encourage the pursuit of truth. They must view this pursuit as central to their commitment to responsibility and remain skeptical of cultural idioms that come and go, such as the adolescent’s plaintive cry in transgender cases: “I am a boy trapped in a girl’s body!” This cry is never a factual report about the reality of her or his sex, but usually a cry for help, seizing upon a newly coined “idiom of distress”: “I’m so fearful and unsure of myself and my future, I must, as others claim, be living in the wrong body, trapped in the wrong sex.” Psychiatrists help not by “affirming” the bizarre conclusion but by seeking and treating the source of the generating fears."

"Consistent with their explicit therapeutic intent, Bender, Fisher, and Simmons each offer essentially the same hypothesis based on a psychological interpretation of childhood schizophrenia: " The working hypothesis of this study is that the psychosis is a massive defensive structure in the service of protecting and defending the patient against his feelings and affectual states" (Fisher & Castile, 1963). Psychedelic drugs were viewed as a powerful means of undermining an intractable defense system and thereby making the patient more receptive to contact and communication with others."

"With regard to the purpose of these studies, all were to some extent exploring the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs rather than their psychotomimetic properties. This was least true of Freedman and his coworkers (1962) who viewed LSD primarily as a means of studying the schizophrenic process by "intensifying pre-existing symptomology." This orientation contrasted sharply with Bender's view. Noting that withdrawn children became more emotionally responsive while aggressive children became less so, she hypothesized that psychedelic drugs "tend to 'normalize' behavior rather than subdue or stimulate it." This basic difference in expectations seems at least partially responsible for Bender's extremely favorable outcomes and Freedman's rather poor results. Regarding all forms of psychotherapy, it has become a truism that " where there is no therapeutic intent, there is no therapeutic result" (Charles Savage in Abramson, 1960, p. 193)."

"She does not believe that Wonder Woman tends to masochism or sadism. Furthermore, she believes that even if it did-you can teach either perversion to children-one can only bring out what is inherent in the child. However she did make the reservation that if the woman slaves wore chains (and enjoyed them) for no purpose whatsoever, there would be no point in chaining them."

"Dr. Bender was known for developing, in 1923, the Bender-Gestault Visual Motor Test, a neuropsychological examination that has become a worldwide standard. She spent many years researching the cause of childhood schizophrenia and was responsible for studies on child suicides and violence."

"They said, "This is good because it is history. This is real," which is another reason why it is bad. They also gave a picture of colonial days where the mother was being tommyhawked by the Indians, with a baby at her breast, and the baby was being dropped on the ground. Now, this was history. Certainly it is history, but do our children today have to be exposed to such things? This is not history. I see no excuse whatsoever for a parent magazine group or an approved group approving that sort of thing. It was quite contrary to the code which we eventually established for the comic people."

"Mr. BEASER Since delinquency does appear in broken homes as well as others, assuming this is a broken home and they depicted a broken home, would the child identify his own mother and father with the pictures in the comic book?"

"So I advised them that in my experience children throughout the ages, long before Superman existed, tried, to fly, and also it has been my specific experience, since I have been at Bellevue Hospital, that certain children with certain emotional problems are particularly preoccupied with the problem of flying, both fascinated by it, and fearful of it. And we frequently have on our ward at Bellevue the problem of making Superman capes in occupational therapy and then the children wearing them and fighting over them and one thing or another ─ and only about 3 months ago we had such, what we call epidemic, and a number of children were hurt because they tried to fly off the top of radiators or off the top of bookcases or what not and got bumps."

"It was hoped that these drugs might prove effective in breaking through autistic defenses, improving autonomic nervous system functioning, and modifying distorted perceptual experiences. There were some differences in results in the various groups. In general, the younger autistic children became less anxious, less autistic and plastic, more aware and responsive, with some changes in verbalization and qualitative improvement, on the Vineland Social Maturity Scale. The girls and older autistic boys showed similar results, but much less marked and persistent. Verbal children showed improvement in general behavior, with marked changes in fantasy and bizarre ideation to more insightful, reality-oriented, though often anxious and depressive attitudes, and improved maturity and organization. There were no major side effects, though a few patients on UML had muscular spasms and vasomotor changes in the legs, generally of a temporary nature. It is significant to note that while most of these patients had required tranquilizing or, other medications, they could all now be maintained only on the LSD or UML. A few patients received reserpine to control excessive activity, aggression, or biting."

"We do not use it as a psychoanalytic tool. Our idea was to give it as a daily drug. It is our general experience that frequently the children respond to many drugs that affect the central nervous system differently than adults. This is common knowledge; at least, to those of us using drugs with children. So we were not surprised to find, in our early initial studies, that if the children were near puberty or in puberty they responded to the first dose with anxiety and disturbance, just as the adolescent boys did. But even these children could be maintained on high doses of the drug, just as the adolescent boys were, so that the drugs can be given to these children in continuing doses. What tolerance means, I don't know. Tolerance may be established in our patients. The chemical studies suggest this, and even our psychological studies indicate a slight change later on, a leveling off of response as compared to initial reaction, but the long-term reaction is still the most valuable reaction to the drug."

"Now, I can well imagine children, and I know plenty of disturbed children from homes where they have less support than my children do, because, after all, my children have not only had the support of myself, but of our very many friends, who on occasions of these various things and, after all, there are lots of children in the world whose fathers have been killed by gangsters or who don't know who their fathers are, and who live in a gangster's world and whose fathers are gangsters killing other people ─ I don't know that crime is quite as bad in the world as we try to make it out to be, and these children I am sure will be disturbed by such things. If they have to be exposed to them, or are exposed to them, they should have a wise adult who can discuss the matters with them and talk it over with them."

"There is another reason why Superman has had good influence. That is the years of continuity of the Superman character. The children know that Superman will always come out on the right side. On that, I can give you another story about what they wanted to do. At the end of the Second World War we had the problem of a certain number of soldiers coming home as amputees. One of the script writers got the bright idea that we ought to prepare children for their fathers coming home as amputees by having one of the characters─ I don’t think it was Superman ─ one of the others ─ have an accident and lose his leg. They wanted to know what I thought about that idea. I said I thought it was absolutely terrible because I felt that the children loved this character and, after all, how many children were going to have to face the question of an amputee father? Certainly there are far better ways of preparing such children for such a father than to have to shock the whole comic reading children public. So I disapproved of it."

"We then gave LSD in the same doses to non-autistic schizophrenic boys 6 to 12 years of age. They were intelligent and verbal and could be tested psychologically and in psychiatric interviews (Bender et al., 1963). They were selected because they had typical schizophrenic psychosis, with flying fantasies and identification and body image difficulties, loose ego boundaries, introjected objects and voices and bizarre ideologies. They had obvious anxiety and labile vaso-vegetative functions. After administering LSD to these children we found results contrary to those reported in adults. These children became more insightful, more objective, more realistic; and in a short time they became frankly depressed for reality reasons. They noted they were in the hospital, that they were away from their family, and that they had had "crazy" ideas before."

"There's no such thing as a normal child."

"Our own definition of childhood schizophrenia has been a clinical entity, occurring in childhood before the age of eleven years, which "reveals pathology in behavior at every level and in every area of integration or patterning within the functioning of the central nervous system, be it vegetative, motor, perceptual, intellectual, emotional, or social. Further more, this behavior pathology disturbs the patterns of every functioning field in a characteristic way. The pathology cannot therefore be thought of as a focal in the architecture of the central nervous system, but rather as striking at the substratum of integrative functioning or biologically patterned behavior" (1) At present the only concept we have of this pathology is in terms of field forces in which temporal rather than spatial factors are emphasized. Within the concept of field forces, one can accept some idea of a focal disorder, since no one integrated function is ever completely lost or inhibited, and since there are different degrees of severity of disturbance in the life history of any child and between two different children. This also differs with the period of onset. The diagnostic criteria for the 100 schizophrenic children which make up this study have been rigid. In each child it has been possible to demonstrate characteristic disturbances in every patterned functioning field of behavior. Every schizophrenic child reacts to the psychosis in a way determined by his own total personality including the infantile experiences and the level of maturation of the personality. This reaction is usually a neurotic one determined by the anxiety stirred up by the disturbing phenomena in the vaso-vegetative, motility, perceptual, and psychological fields. Interferences in normal developmental patterns and regressive phenomena with resulting primitive reactions are related to both the essential psychosis and the reaction of the anxiety-ridden personality. There are, of course, children in whom the differential diagnosis is very difficult. Those with some form of diffuse encephalopathy or diffuse developmental deviations in which the normally strong urges for normal development push the child into frustration and reactive anxiety may present many schizophrenic features in the motility disturbances, intellectual interferences, and psychological reactions."

"Mr. BEASER: Now, let me ask you one final question, Doctor. Would you say ─ I suppose you would ─ that your opinion on this subject is in no way in influenced by the fact that you are member of the Superman comics advisory board?"

"This group of boys showed considerable: and consistent effects from medication with UML or LSD daily for two to eleven months. Their behavior, ward management, school-room adjustment and progress at home changed favorably with less acting out and less disturbed behavior. They not only needed no other tranquilizing, sedative, or antidepressant medication, but furthermore, unlike the tranquilizers which made them sleepy and groggy, they were generally cheerful and alert. Personnel and families noted the difference. Repeated psychiatric interviews revealed a change in fantasy material which was less bizarre, personalized or disturbing. Depressive, anxious and paranoid attitudes were focused on real objective problems. Insight was impressive. Intellectual changes, as seen in psychometric tests, indicated improved maturity, better organization and motivation with a rise in IQ which was reflected in improved school work. The Rorschach and drawing tests also showed increased maturity and control with clearer thinking."

"Superman represents an instinctive problem that we are all born and grown up with, that we can fly ─ after all, we can fly now; we couldn't before ─ and that we can carry on all kinds of scientific investigations, that we can stop crime, which Superman does, and that we can have a good influence on the world, and that we can be protected by the powerful influences in the world which may be our own parents, or may be the authorities, or what not."

"My God, how can you stand such things, children? They say, "Mom, don't you know it is only television, it is not real.""

"Moral injury is present when"