Rosemary Radford Ruether with David Ruether
Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010. Soft cover. 200 pp. $22.00
Reviewed by Paul D. Steinke
Bellevue Hospital Center
Get this book! Rosemary Radford Ruether provides us actually with several books. Many Forms of Madness is a mother’s harrowing narrative about her son, David’s lifelong struggle with mental illness. It is a story of love, suffering, disappointment, and rage with scraps of hope shoved between the lines. The historian, Ruether provides an upsetting, and shameful record of society’s care of the mentally ill. Her chapter on the causes of schizophrenia bristles with the arrogance and ignorance of the mental health professions down through the decades. Another book within this book is Ruether’s expose of the international pharmaceutical cartel that controls the education of psychiatrists and the direction of the therapeutic treatment of the mentally ill. She is enraged by the pharmaceutical companies pushing their life destroying psychotropic drugs on the most vulnerable people in our communities.
One of the most powerful elements of Ruether’s book, she may not have intended. It lies between the lines – she cannot not communicate her rage. Her attempt to reframe David’s life is a mother’s attempt to redeem a life shriveled almost dry by forces beyond her control. You won’t be able to read this book straight through, but you will not be able to put this book down.
It is no comfort to the mentally ill or their families to say schizophrenia remains a mystery. It remains an under investigated illness. Our vaunted sciences and technology know nothing more about this illness today then they did forty years ago. I do not see much difference between patient care at Norwich State Hospital in Connecticut in 1971 and Bellevue’s eight psychiatric units and numerous outpatient clinics in 2010. In forty years science and humane treatment have given hope to depressed people and folks with Bi-polar illness. In those same forty years the treatment of schizophrenic patients has changed little. The light of hope provided by the community mental health movement in the 70s was quickly extinguished. We have no better idea today about Schizophrenia than we did forty years ago. The cycle of hospitalization and/or imprisonment, homelessness, group homes, board and care homes (usually old rundown motels), and hopelessness remains the daily bread of all these people. And these fellow human beings, created in the image of God, continue to be misunderstood, mistreated and marginalized. Their lot is the cry of dereliction from the cross!
A young woman recently appeared in the doorway of my office and asked if she could talk to me. I was reading Many Forms of Madness at the time and she was not unlike how I envisioned Rosemary Ruether’s son, David to be. After we shook hands and she sat down she said, “I’m schizophrenic and get depressed. I just got past a bad relapse and my social worker thinks I should get some training and you teach people to visit patients.” She then opened her briefcase and showed me several certificates of education programs she had completed. We talked about her accomplishments and her sister, “a successful business woman.” She was matter of fact in relating her occasional homelessness.
My colleagues know that I seldom refuse anyone a single unit of CPE, whether undocumented or homeless. My afternoon guest was straightforward with me. I needed to be straightforward with her. “Our clinical training program is so emotionally intense. I, I… do not think that someone with your recent medical history would, er…er… gain much from it.” The afternoon guest experienced my awkwardness in turning her down. Her reply graciously saved me: “I really can’t manage something so intense.” I wish my therapist could read me as well.
Years ago Jay Haley, the pioneering family therapist, in a lecture at Philadelphia State Hospital posed the question: What are schizophrenics for? Anton Boisen discovered the answer years before as a patient and then a chaplain on the dark, forbidding floors of Worcester State Hospital. The answer is they are our teachers. These living human documents, are not broken pieces of machinery, they are sons and daughters – created in the image of God.
Rosemary Radford Ruether’s Many Forms of Madness: A Family’s Struggle with Mental Illness and the Mental Health System provides us with an urgent call to again become advocates for the mentally ill. The State Mental Hospitals from Milledgeville to Central Islip in which many CPE supervisors and professional chaplains trained are mostly gone now. The legions of mentally ill remain in prisons, on the streets, and in board and care homes. They need again our louder voices and deeper deeds to survive and thrive. Society fails them. Mentally challenged people and their families seldom hear from the church, the synagogue or the masjid. We haven’t learned all we need to learn from these chronically ill people. Without embarrassment they openly display their neediness before us. “They are not self-sufficient,” as Stanley Hauerwas has often reminded us (Hauerwas, 1986, p.176). They can teach us to be less embarrassed and more open about our own neediness and the poverty of our own lives. Rosemary Ruether’s Many Forms of Madness provides fresh sight, stirring motivation, and a call to renew our commitment to those who taught us how to do pastoral care. Created She them in Her own image.
References
Hauerwas, S. (1986), Suffering Presence: Theological Reflections on Medicine, the Mentally Handicapped, and the Church. Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press.
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