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Most inner-city mental health clinics are in trouble. Black clients come
to them, often under pressure from courts and police, with interlocking problems that encompass everything that is sick in the society. White professionals are aware of the socioeconomic gulf, but most of them feel helpless to bridge it with the traditional tools of psychotherapy. Clients go away angry or despairing, feeling turned off, shunted away, unheard. On both sides, there is enormous frustration. This book opens the territory between them and explores it with great courage and honesty. It is the work of a team of concerned professionals who found a novel format for probing fundamental questions. The answers are of immediate value.
Four well-known family therapists, all of them directors of large-city programs, demonstrated their skills and their shortcomings at the annual conference of the American Group Psychotherapy Association. It is important to know, the authors point out, that one of them, Dr. Thomas L. Brayboy, is black, that the late Dr. Nathan Ackerman was Jewish, and that Drs. Carl W. Whitaker and Robert MacGregor both practiced in the deep South.
Each in turn held a half-hour initial interview with a troubled black family, who had come not because they wanted therapy but because there had been a quarrel, and they had been sent from a hospital emergency room under threat of an arrest.
No actual family could endure such a work-out; this one was created by role-playing staff members of New York's Metropolitan Hospital. Oscar S. Smith, M.S.W., played the father, a long-unemployed carpenter. Mrs. Ruth Miles, C.S.W., was his depressed and angry wife, Mrs. Pearl Pryor, her strong-minded, dignified mother, Miss Jacqueline Williams, the rebellious, hurt, 16-year-old daughter, who found herself pregnant and isolated, and Richard Presha, the bitter, articulate son. The realities they enacted were those they encountered daily as mental health workers; the passionate intensity came from th