Back to the basics


	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 many pleasures of being a psychologist is the variety inherent in a profession that tries to understand human behavior, in health and illness, across all strata of society and contexts of culture throughout the lifespan. Not that any one psychologist can do it all, but for those of us who like a change of pace in our work, the profession offers abundant opportunities. My own practice gives me the chance to work with people hospitalized for the treatment of severe and persistent mental illness and, in a vastly different setting, to assist managers in business, human services and government to develop their leadership skills. As different as these two groups appear to be, they are more alike than it would initially seem.

When I am introduced to a new group of managers, I have learned to downplay my day job in the state mental hospital. I do this to reassure the clients wondering why, of all the consultants in our group, I was assigned to work with them. When I escort my charges from the lecture hall to the consulting room, they exit to a chorus of good-natured joking and snickering from their colleagues paired with consultants from business or academia. Even so, most of us are psychologists first and we are there to help the client achieve some insight into his or her managerial style and start to make the adjustments necessary to become more effective leaders. Substitute "coping style" for "managerial style" and "members of the community" for leaders and the same sentence describes the work in both settings.

Still, stereotypes die hard and when people learn about these two areas of my work as a psychologist, they are amazed at the contrast. There are, in fact, extensive and obvious differences in the clients' levels of achievement, spheres of influence and manner of appearance and presentation yet, just below the surface, we are all, in the words of Harry Stack Sullivan, "much more simply human than otherwise." The well-spoken federal agent sits opposite me, places his ever-present handcuffs on the table between us and wonders aloud why he makes people nervous. We are off and running for several hours on this and other topics bearing on his effectiveness as a manager. Later the same afternoon, a recently apprehended fugitive from justice faces me across a different table, hands over a notification of his requirement to register as a sex offender and opens the door to the exploration and, it is hoped, eventual elimination of this behavior.

The schizophrenic young man, distracted by the voices in his head, wants to convince his treatment team that he is ready for unsupervised passes on hospital grounds. The young engineer tries to persuade the operations manager to implement his team's suggestion for improving the factory's ventilation system. Both men start from very different places but both face the challenge of learning to be more persuasive. Most of our schizophrenic patients are not likely to become leaders of technical work groups and most of the managers I meet have passed the age where they are likely to develop schizophrenia. Yet there are only a limited number of skills any person needs to succeed in life and psychologists in very different settings, working with very different populations, are doing similar kinds of work.

Then too, there are points where the lives of the mentally ill and the high achieving mentally healthy intersect. Consider the successful company vice president struggling to understand a child with serious mental illness or to cope with his own bouts of severe depression. Or, from the opposite perspective, there is the man with severe mania facing the challenge of returning to his work as an architect with his symptoms under better though still imperfect control.

If the clear line between the mentally healthy and the mentally ill is starting to blur, then I am making my point. Psychology has always taught that as humans we share the same basic needs and challenges. Having a mental illness does not change any of that; it just makes everything more difficult.

A funny thing happened as I shuttled between the consulting room and the therapy room last week and the event underlined the continuity of my work in both settings. In the consulting room, a new manager struggled to find an effective way to enforce the company's dress code, specifically, to ban the short skirts and loose jeans that, in his words, "immodestly displayed employees' underwear." Later the same day, in the therapy room, a patient offered the answer, "underwear," to a verbal fluency exercise asking group members to name items of clothing used to keep warm. The answer was not only wrong but was also provocative in a way that this person is in the hospital to change. When I disallowed the answer on both grounds, the man said he couldn't help it. It was a "Freudian slip." But the point is, it really didn't matter whose slip it was. It was still underwear.