Shrinks (3 page)

“Are you familiar with orgones?” he asked her after she sat down.

When Abbey shook her head, Dr. Reich explained that all mental illness—including her own condition, whatever it might be—stemmed from the constriction of orgones, a hidden form of energy uniting all of nature’s elements. “This isn’t a
theory
, the orgone is
burning
in the air and in the soil,” insisted Dr. Reich, rubbing his fingers together. Physical and mental health, according to Dr. Reich, depended on the proper configuration of orgones, a term derived from the words “organism” and “orgasm.”

Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957), Freud disciple, psychoanalyst, originator of Orgone Theory. Photograph 1952. (© Bettmann/CORBIS)

Abbey nodded enthusiastically; this was exactly the kind of answer she had been looking for. “What you need,” Dr. Reich continued, “is to restore the natural flow of orgones within your body. Fortunately, there is a way to do this. Would you like me to begin the treatment?”

“Yes, doctor.”

“Please disrobe down to your underclothes.”

Abbey hesitated. Every physician-patient relationship is founded upon a bedrock of trust, since we are granting the doctor unrestricted access to our body, from the blemishes on our skin to the depths of our bowels. But the psychiatrist-patient relationship runs deeper still, for we are entrusting the doctor with our
mind
—the very crux of our being. The psychiatrist calls upon us to reveal our thoughts and emotions—unveil our furtive desires and guilty secrets. The therapeutic relationship with a psychiatrist presumes that he is a trained expert and knows what he is doing, just like any orthopedist or ophthalmologist. But does the psychiatrist truly merit the same presumption of competence as other physicians?

Abbey hesitated for a moment but then recalled Dr. Reich’s impressive credentials and medical training, slid out of her dress, carefully folded it, and placed it on the desk. Reich motioned for her to sit on a large wooden chair. She nervously sat down. The cool slats raised goose bumps on her bare legs.

The doctor approached her and gingerly began to touch her arms and shoulders, then moved down to her knees and thighs as if probing for tumors. “Yes, here—and here. Do you feel it? These are nexuses where your orgones are constricted. Please hold out your hand.”

She obeyed. Without warning, he briskly smacked her arm just above her elbow, as if swatting a fly. Abbey cried out more from shock than pain. Dr. Reich smiled and raised his finger.

“There! You have
released
the energy locked inside! Don’t you feel it?”

Each week for the next six months, Abbey returned to the Orgone Institute. During some of her visits, Dr. Reich used an “orgonoscope,” an instrument that resembled a small brass telescope, to view the flow of orgone energy in her body, which—according to the doctor—was a bright electric blue. On other occasions, he instructed Abbey to strip down to her undergarments and squeeze into a telephone booth–sized box with a rubber hose dangling from her neck. This was an “orgone accumulator,” which amplified Abbey’s orgones and helped to reduce her anxiety.

Orgone Accumulator, device used for Orgone Therapy. (© Food and Drug Administration/Science Source)

Abbey gratefully accepted Dr. Reich’s ministrations. She was not alone. People from all around the world sought help from Reich and his acolytes. His books were translated into a dozen languages, his orgone energy appliances were distributed internationally, and his ideas influenced a generation of psychotherapists. He was one of the most recognized psychiatrists of his era. But was the trust that Abbey placed in him justified?

In 1947, after Reich claimed his orgone accumulators could cure cancer, the FDA intervened. They soon concluded that his therapeutic devices and theory of orgone energy were a “fraud of the first magnitude.” A judge issued an injunction banning all orgone devices and advertising. Reich—who genuinely believed in the power of orgones—was crushed. As the investigation progressed, former confidants reported that Reich was becoming increasingly paranoid and delusional; he believed that Earth was being attacked by UFOs, and he had taken to wandering through the Orgone Institute at night with his neck swathed in a bandana and a revolver at his waist, like some frontier gunfighter. During the subsequent trial for illegally selling orgone devices, the judge privately suggested that Reich might need his own psychiatrist. The jury found Reich guilty, the institute was shut down, and Reich was sentenced to prison. In 1957, he died in the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary from heart failure.

We don’t know exactly what Reich’s patients felt when they learned that Wilhelm Reich’s treatments were poppycock. But I can hazard a reasonable guess. Psychiatric chicanery, sadly, remains a problem to this very day, and I’ve encountered numerous patients who were treated by twenty-first-century charlatans. Not many things in life make you feel as violated as trusting your most intimate needs to a medical professional, only to have that trust betrayed through incompetence, deception, or delusion. I imagine Abbey repeating something a woman once told me upon discovering that her daughter’s charismatic psychiatrist was trying to manipulate the twelve-year-old girl for his own purposes and turn her against her family: “He was a total phony. But how would we have ever known? We needed help, and everything about him seemed legitimate. How could anyone have known?”

As a psychiatrist myself, born while Wilhelm Reich was still treating patients, I have always been particularly troubled by one aspect of Reich’s story: the failure of the psychiatric profession to expose one of their own as a fraud. Indeed, in the eyes of the public, the institution of psychiatry often seemed to endorse Reich’s preposterous methods. Why was psychiatry unable to inform a public desperate for guidance that Reich’s methods had no scientific basis whatsoever?

Unfortunately, unsound methods have never been far from the main currents of psychiatry, and leading psychiatric institutions have often credited techniques that were questionable, if not wholly inept. The sobering truth is that Wilhelm Reich is not a historical anomaly at all, but a discomfiting emblem of medicine’s most controversial specialty.

Psychiatry’s attempts to help the public distinguish evidence-based treatments from unsubstantiated fabrications have long been inadequate, and remain so today. You may wonder how thousands of educated intelligent people—teachers, scientists, and businesspeople, as well as court reporters—could have ever believed that an invisible network of orgasmic energy was the key to mental health. Yet even now, charlatans drawn from the ranks of professional psychiatry continue to dupe desperate and unsuspecting patients as the institutions of psychiatry passively stand by.

Daniel Amen, author of the popular
Change Your Brain
series of books and the star of PBS programs on the brain, might be the most recognized living psychiatrist. Joan Baez, Rick Warren, and Bill Cosby tout him, while the high-end motivational speaker Brendon Burchard once introduced Amen as “the number one neuroscience guy on the planet.” Yet Amen’s current fame rests entirely on spurious practices unproven by scientific research and rejected by mainstream medicine.

Amen suggests that by looking at images of the brain from SPECT scans (single photon emission computed tomography), he can diagnose mental illness—a practice that has more in common with skull-bump phrenology than modern psychiatry. “There is absolutely no evidence for his claims or practices,” asserts Dr. Robert Innis, chief of molecular neuroimaging at the National Institute of Mental Health. In his opinion, “It is unscientific and unjustified, like using an unapproved drug.” In an August 2012
Washington Post
article, Dr. Martha J. Farah, director of the Center for Neuroscience & Society at the University of Pennsylvania, described Amen’s technique more bluntly: “A sham.” Dr. Amen also advocates the use of hyperbaric oxygen and markets his own brand of natural supplements as “brain enhancers”—treatments for which there is also no scientific evidence of efficacy.

Incredibly, current regulatory policies do not prevent someone like Amen from plying his SPECT mumbo jumbo. Even though every member of the governing board of the American Psychiatric Association regards his practice as medical flimflam, Amen continues unimpeded and largely unexposed. Even more frustrating to bona fide mental health practitioners, Amen brazenly claims that his unique methods are far ahead of the ponderous creep of mainstream psychiatry, which is rather like Bernie Madoff ridiculing the lower rate of return on a Fidelity mutual fund.

Just like Wilhelm Reich once was, Daniel Amen is cloaked in a veneer of respectability that makes his techniques seem legitimate. If you were wondering how any of Reich’s patients could have believed that stripping half-naked and climbing inside a strange orgone-collecting apparatus could enhance their mental health, you only need to consider the persuasive power of Amen’s SPECT technique, which presents a striking parallel to orgone accumulators: Patients submit to the injection of radioactive agents into their veins and then dutifully place their heads in a strange gamma ray–collecting apparatus. The mystifying aura of SPECT, with its promise of cutting-edge science, seems as marvelous and bewitching as electric blue orgonomy. How can a layperson hope to distinguish between technologies that are scientifically proven and those conjured out of credible fancy?

To be sure, all medical specialties have suffered from their share of bogus theories, useless treatments, and misguided practitioners. Bleeding and colonic purges were once standard treatments for every malady from arthritis to the flu. Not so long ago, breast cancer was dealt with by radical mastectomies that gouged out most of the chest, including a woman’s ribs. Even today, the FDA lists 187 oft-touted but apocryphal remedies for cancer. The use of antibiotics for colds is widespread, even though antibiotics have no effect on the viruses that cause colds, while useless arthroscopic surgery is too often performed for osteoarthritis of the knees. Bogus stem cell treatments for incurable neurologic illnesses like ALS and spinal cord injuries were the topic of a recent
60 Minutes
exposé. Sham treatments for autism abound, including vitamins, neutraceuticals, dietary supplements, stem cell injections, purges, and the removal of heavy metals from the body by chelation therapy. Patients trek across oceans in order to obtain exotic, expensive, and entirely worthless treatments for every imaginable disease. Even someone as intelligent as Steve Jobs was susceptible to far-fetched practices, delaying medical treatment of his pancreatic cancer in favor of “holistic medicine” until it was too late.

Nevertheless, psychiatry has trumpeted more illegitimate treatments than any other field of medicine, in large part because—until quite recently—psychiatrists could never agree on what actually constituted a mental disorder, much less how best to treat it. If each physician has his or her own definition of illness, then treatments become as varied as shoes, each season bringing a parade of new colors and fashions… and if you don’t know
what
you are treating, then how can treatment ever be effective? Many of the most prominent names in the annals of psychiatry are better known for the dubiousness of their treatments than the good they achieved, despite their mostly charitable intentions: Franz Mesmer’s animal magnetism, Benjamin Rush’s “Bilious Pills,” Julius Wagner-Jauregg’s malaria therapy, Manfred Sakel’s insulin shock therapy, Neil Macleod’s deep sleep therapy, Walter Freeman’s lobotomies, Melanie Klein’s sexual orientation conversion therapy, and R. D. Laing’s existential psychiatry.