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Your Emotions Can
Make You Well
By LEWIS L. ROBBINS, M. D.
Medical Director, Hillside Hospital, Glen Oaks, N. Y.
as told to lames C. G. Conniff
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Dr. Lewis L. Bobbins waa associated with the
anted Menninger Foundation in Topelca, Kans.,
for 18 years. During this time he was director o
the Foundation's Outpatient Division and Depart
ment of Adult Psychiatry and chairman of its Psy
chotherapy Research Project. Since 1958 he has
been medical director of the Hillside Hospital in
Glen Oaks, N. Y.
She was A woman in her early 30s, happily mar
ried to a successful poultry farmer and the
proud mother of five children, oldest age 10LShe
was pretty, nicely dressed, and apparently self
possessed. Inwardly, however, she was a wreck.
When she first came to me at the suggestion of
her family doctor, she .had let the normal emotional
stress of running a busy household build up inside
her almost to the point of explosion.
Her trouble was in not knowing how to find an
outlet for the ordinary feeling of anger and frus
tration which every mother has an outlet accept
able to the neighbors, that is, and to her family.
By talking with her I found that on this score she
was like a surprising number of women. They have
the mistaken notion that it is improper to give
vent to routine emotions. As a result, they develop
A noted psychiatrist
reveals a simple secret
that has helped
many patients find
within themselves
a remedy for
destructive tensions
a haunted, driven look. In my patient's case, it told
me the moment I saw her: this woman is going to
be ill unless she gets help in a hurry.
Without hospitalizing her, we gave her that help.
I saw her not long ago. Smiling and relaxed now,
she leaned out the window of her car to tell me,
"I've stopped building windmills, Doctor. From
here on, it'll be dikes and canals, the way you said.
It's the only kind of life that makes sense."
And not only for housewives, she might have
added. The teen-ager from our Adolescent Pavilion
waved cheerily as I rode up the tree-lined drive
to my office. Not long ago this awkward youth,
tense from the strain of trying to control the emo
tional rip tides of adolescence, wouldn't even have
nodded. Today, thanks to the patient guidance we
were able to give him, the glum anxiety which had
made him painfully withdrawn has vanished.
He turned toward me, grinning and confident
the way a boy should be. "No more windmills,
Doc!" he called. "That's a promise!"
Were these patients the victims of hallucination
modern Don Quixotes who, like that tragicomic
Spanish knight, imagined windmills were their
enemies? Not at all. Like countless other men,
women, and children at hospitals like Hillside,
where we specialize in mental health, these were
people recovering from actual or threatened ill
4 Fomily Weekly. October 29. 1961