Articles

WBSI and the Mental Health Challenge
by Richard Farson

One quarter of the world’s population is troubled by mental health problems—a billion and a half people. If we were to double the number of professional therapists, and work them around the clock, we could not make even a small dent in that statistic. Moreover, the healthier a person is, the better our therapies work, meaning that we could be even more effective in improving the lives of the remaining four and a half billion. That illustrates just how far we are from meeting the true mental health challenge.

This challenge led the staff of WBSI in the sixties to undertake a program of research into how we might make deep therapeutic experiences available to the larger population at little or no cost. The first question we wanted to answer was what is it that people experience as therapeutic. In searching for that answer, we encountered a surprising finding.

In a study of more than a thousand critical incidents of group therapy—i.e., the moments the participants reported to be therapeutic—WBSI researchers found that the actions of the professional leader of the group accounted for no more of these moments than did the actions of the average group member.

That finding led the researchers to organize and study leaderless, self-directed therapy groups—an idea considered outrageous at the time—but as it turned out, these self-directed groups were virtually indistinguishable from professionally led groups.

Not satisfied with that achievement, WBSI psychologists Lawrence Solomon and Betty Berzon believed these self-directed groups could be made even more effective by structuring them through the use of tape recordings suggesting group activities (audiotapes later published by Bell and Howell). The idea proved to be soundly based. A Stanford University study comparing seventeen approaches to group therapy, including WBSI’s Encounter Tapes, found the institute’s leaderless approach to rank first in perceived safety and third in overall effectiveness.

In its continuing effort to make therapeutic experiences more broadly available, WBSI explored the use of television to motivate and instruct leaderless groups it had organized in the San Diego community. To assist these groups, I led a videotaped group in a television studio each week, and together with documentary filmmaker Bill McGaw, selected the key moments in its development. Using those clips, and under McGaw’s direction, I narrated a weekly series of television broadcasts on the local NBC station.

Research showed that the stimulus of watching the TV program presenting genuine group therapy interaction (a first for television) clearly enhanced the effectiveness of the group meetings in the community. More than that, groups formed spontaneously and gathered informally in churches, homes and bars to view the program and then hold their own group meetings.

Still, we thought we could do better. An effort followed to capture more of the intensity of a group therapy situation than could be accomplished in a one hour televised meeting. Again with direction from Bill McGaw, Carl Rogers and I led a group filmed for sixteen hours over a weekend. The resulting film, with the editing help of famed producer/director Stanley Kramer, won the 1968 Oscar for best feature length documentary, and has since been used to foster therapeutic understanding for hundreds of thousands of people, all over the world.

Given the recent developments in television programming, it is interesting for those of us on the WBSI staff to remember that at the time we had hopes and plans for the potential benefits to society of showing people being genuinely themselves on television. We could imagine that watching a father telling his child a bedtime story or a couple making up after a fight would remind the viewer about the better side of humanity. We never could have imagined then what has now become known as "reality programming." Our concept, transformed into a marketable commodity on the Jerry Springer show and many other staged reality programs, has had precisely the opposite effect, showing the worst side of people, leading the viewer to cynicism rather than hope.

This "reality" fad will pass, but the fundamental power of the mass media to serve the mental health of our population will remain as a great, untapped potential. It can be particularly helpful as it capitalizes on the fact that given the right circumstances ordinary people can be very, very good for each other.

The larger implication of our work is that mental health professionals must become what I call metaprofessionals. The professionals now working on the front lines should be elevated to higher levels, to Meta levels, where they can orchestrate the work of laymen, becoming, in a sense, architects of therapeutic experiences. That is a tough sell to any therapist, because by and large they want to be present at every therapeutic moment. But if they are to meet the challenge, they will need to redesign their work to serve the larger needs. We at WBSI can attest to the fact that such endeavors can be richly rewarding.

Indeed all professionals must become metaprofessionals. The same challenges to meet the real needs of the world’s population exist as strongly in healthcare, education, legal assistance, and architecture. The first step is to realize that professions, unlike businesses, should not be commodified. Professions must be goal driven, not market driven. The second step is one that WBSI has pioneered, learning to put mass media more into the public interest. The rest will be easy.