I am a life member of the American Psychoanalytic Association. I retired after 45 years of active practice in the year 2000.
On Tuesday, Dec. 11, I heard the following shocking radio news report. In a recent year, possibly 2005, over 6000 Iraq war veterans in the United States committed suicide. The number was hard to believe, but they broke it down to 120/week that year.
If the report is accurate, I hear it as a clarion call to action for members of our Association.
In my day, we believed we had a treatment for suicidal depression. It was called psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. In the past decade or two it seems to have disappeared from public view.
With such a news report it is our moral and professional obligation to advertise in every way possible that there is a rational, effective treatment for depression. We owe it to our young men and women whom we have sent to war who come home unable to cope. We know how to help them cope. Let us shout from the rooftops that this country is letting our young men and women die because of ignorance of our science. Every psychoanalytic institute should offer it to every veteran, free if necessary. Let us do our bit.
TAP welcomes letters to the editor. Letters must be less than 350 words long. Letters will be printed as space allows and at the discretion of the editorial board.
We seem to have fallen victim to the aggressive advances of drug treatment. Drug treatment should be used if needed, but it can never be a substitute for the talking cure. It is as if we ourselves no longer believe in its usefulness or effectiveness.
TAP welcomes letters to the editor. Letters must be less than 350 words long. Letters will be printed as space allows and at the discretion of the editorial board.
This is an old disease to us. Freud called it traumatic neurosis. During WWI it was called shell shock. During WWII it was called battle fatigue. Since the Vietnam War it has been given the glamorous name post traumatic stress disease. These are the same diseases. Freud taught us how to treat it. Analysts, of all people, should remember that Freud's treatment consisted of abreaction and catharsis, listening to the patient's messages through free association, and carefully dealing with transference, resistance, unconscious processes, and infantile sexuality. It is not “counseling,” which means support and advice giving. It is through the humane, human relationship between analyst and patient established by the analytic method that cure occurs.
This is an urgent matter. Get a patient involved with you and you are on the way to effective help for that patient.
Joseph E. Lifschutz, M.D.
Clinical Professor of Health and Medical Sciences University of California, Berkeley, ret.