Back to the library


	Alan Bodnar, Ph.D. is the Co-Director of Psychology Training at Westborough State Hospital, Mass. and a consultant in the field of leadership development.

By Alan Bodnar, Ph.D.

One of the first excursions some of our patients take into the community is to the town library. For many, returning to the library restores a sense of normalcy lost when they became mentally ill and had to be hospitalized. The library offers a safe haven where everyone is welcome. Yet, when you fill out an application for a library card, you have to supply your address and that can be awkward if you happen to be living in a state hospital. Not that anyone necessarily recognizes the hospital from its street address or that it would matter to them if they did. Still, you wonder.

It feels safer at the hospital but you know that you have to take the next step if you hope to get on with your life. You'll go to the library next week, but now you have to hurry so you're not late for the Poetry and Fiction group. The group convenes every week in the front room of what was once the residence of the hospital's superintendents.

It consists of men and women, white and black, in various stages of recovery from severe and persistent mental illnesses often complicated by histories of trauma and substance abuse. Some are there to fill a gap in their schedules; some, out of a newcomer's curiosity; and others, perhaps out of habit. Yet, like you, most group members keep coming because they enjoy stories and have learned to recognize the written word as both a window and a mirror, continually surprising us with a picture of our own struggles and follies glimpsed through the window of other lives.

This week we are looking through the window provided by author, Richard Wright, and see him as a 19-year-old black man in 1927, trying to get books from the public library in Memphis, Tenn. We watch Wright in the office where he works, considering which of his white co-workers to ask for help in getting the books he wants. Because blacks are not permitted to have library cards in 1927 Memphis, Wright has to find someone he can trust to ask for the loan of his card and a note authorizing him to collect the desired books. He has to identify which of his co-workers will understand and not be threatened by his desire to acquire knowledge that can narrow the gap between Wright and the white establishment.

As one of our group members puts it, he has to find someone who does not want to keep Wright a prisoner of "the slave mentality." The author also needs a confederate who sincerely believes in his capacity to read and learn, who will not dismiss his ambition as an unrealistic expectation and who will refrain from paternalistic warnings to be careful what he reads because it might addle his brain.

Wright chooses wisely and, with the library card provided by his ally, and his own quick thinking, he convinces a suspicious librarian to lend him the books he wants. What he reads inspires and encourages him, giving him a glimpse of a larger life that he had scarcely imagined. His newfound knowledge is both a blessing and a curse, offering him at once the hope of a better life and the challenge of having to do something different in order to get what he begins to dream that he might one day have.

For the author, the choice is clear though by no means easy. He can remain in the South and live out the role of the genial slave pretending to be content while the established order limits his opportunities and tramples his dignity. He can turn his hatred of his oppressors against himself and, by extension, against others of his own race, or try to forget his sorrows in the oblivion of alcohol and sex. But Wright, who refuses to let others violate his dignity, will not violate himself. His only recourse is to leave Memphis for the promise of a better life in the North and the challenge of unknown dangers in an unfamiliar place.

A young black woman in the group exclaims in surprise that the author is talking about her. Although she has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, she is not voicing an idea of reference but, instead, resonating with a universal theme of minority persecution.

The ensuing discussion takes us from an examination of racial prejudice to a consideration of the ways in which people with mental illness are injured by ignorance, bigotry and even well-meaning paternalism that sets artificial limits on the extent of their recovery. The hardest limits to surpass are the ones we impose on ourselves because illness and failure have made us too afraid or too weary to revise our dreams and try again.

In our group therapy room, the distance between Memphis of 1927 and New England of 2007 shrinks to the length of time it takes to realize that prejudice continues to do its damage and that extraordinary courage is as important here and now as it was there and then. It has been a good group but next week, yes, definitely next week, you'll go to the library. n

Back to the library (July 2007 Issue)

By Alan Bodnar, Ph.D.

Back to the library
(July 2007 Issue)