A Rare Look Into a Private World.

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: AUGUST 10, 1999
Time: 12:00
Tran: 081001np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: "Six People in Search of a Life": an Interview with Paul Solotaroff
Sect: News; Domestic
Time: 12:00

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

MARTY MOSS-COANE, GUEST HOST: From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is
FRESH AIR.

I'm Marty Moss-Coane, filling in for Terry Gross.

On today's FRESH AIR, a rare look into the private world of
therapy. First from the urban setting of New York, we talk with Paul
Solotaroff, a former editor at the "Village Voice." He followed the
progress of six people in group therapy over a year for his new book,
"Group: Six People In Search of a Life."

Then we meet Michael Rosmann, a psychologist specializing in
helping farmers get through rough times. Sometimes he sees them in
his office, but just as often he counsels them while standing in their
field. He says today's economy is threatening the family farm.

That's all coming up on FRESH AIR.

First the news.

(NEWS BREAK)

MOSS-COANE: I'm Marty Moss-Coane, in for Terry Gross.

One of the mechanisms that allows therapy to work is its
confidentiality. It helps to create a safe space in which people can
share their most intimate experiences. It's unusual to have a
journalist taking notes and tape-recording a group therapy session, so
my guest, Paul Solotaroff's new book is a rare look into a private
world.

"Group: Six People In Search of a Life" documents the intimacies,
drama, frustrations and changes he witnessed among six New Yorkers
during their year of group therapy. Solotaroff sat several feet away
from this circle of people trying not to make noise or to have an
effect on what was going on. Paul Solotaroff was no stranger to group
therapy. He had spent two years working out his own problems in a
group led by the same psychiatrist.

PAUL SOLOTAROFF, AUTHOR, "GROUP: SIX PEOPLE IN SEARCH OF A LIFE":
I had been laboring with a fairly severe case of panic disorder for
about 11, 12 years, the onset of which coincided with my last semester
of college. That's not unusual. Often, the precipitating event in
panic is a life change of fairly substantive order.

And 11 years later, I had lost about 40 pounds. I had drifted in
and out of graduate programs, from city to city, and was having a
pretty lousy time. I somehow had wound up, through a series of left
turns, as the sports editor at the "Village Voice," where I was even
money to have a panic episode every closing day, which was Monday, and
being seen by a therapist, who was lovely and effective except she
didn't know the first thing about panic. And finally, she sent me to
the guy who's made such a substantive difference in my life.

MOSS-COANE: Well, you were able to get to the right therapist
that you profile in this book, and he was able to put you on the right
medication. And as you write about it, that really took care of the
panic attacks, but I guess it didn't take care of the sort of residual
fall-out of 10 years of anxiety and stress.

SOLOTAROFF: Anxiety, stress and loss. When you lose 10 years --
in my case, I lost the better half of my 20s and 30s -- it's a very
heavy bite. And I had to come to terms with the fall-out of those 10
years in absentia. And so he made clear to me fairly early in our
relationship that he was forming a group of panic sufferers, people
who were fairly to extremely effective in their professional lives and
utterly kind of terror-stricken outside of that. And the group
started soon thereafter, about a month or two later, and it was the
most extraordinary experience I've ever participated in.

MOSS-COANE: Well, this may be an unfair question, but in a
nutshell, how did group therapy help you?

SOLOTAROFF: Well, first of all, the sight of those four, five
other people in the chairs next to me or across the room was an
enormously comforting one. You can be told by a therapist that your
condition is actually quite common, but to hear it coming out of the
mouths of others, other adaptive and sensitive and intelligent people
who suffer from precisely the same kinds of neurochemical malfunction
that you do, is really orienting and stabilizing in a way that's hard
to express.

The other thing is that as I heard the effect of the condition on
the lives of these other people, I became much clearer on the subtler
ways I'd been affected and -- but bottom line, it was the sight of us
getting better together, it was the sight of us really kind of
emerging as ourselves in the course of that year and a half or two
years, you know, going from this -- you know, these five or six
tightly clenched people who were living as close to alone as it's
possible to, while still being in a marriage or still holding a job,
to people really in possession of their confidence and all of their
humanity and their dignity. And by the end of that two years, our
lives had been radically transformed.

MOSS-COANE: What made you then want to write this book and take
readers inside a therapy session? Was it to sort of resurrect or shed
some light on what you think is potentially a positive, although, of
course, very difficult interaction?

SOLOTAROFF: Well, again, there are a number of answers, but the
most trenchant one is that those stories are so powerful. It's that
whole notion of change, and change over a prescribed period of time
that I found enormously kind of seductive. And when I went back to
the therapist to talk to him about a book and found out that he was
about to assemble a group even more kind of verbal and self-
dramatizing than mine, I, you know, was just, you know, unable to --
to think of doing anything else.

MOSS-COANE: Well, the leader of this group -- and I should say
that everyone in this book has a pseudonym. The pseudonym for him is
Charles Lathan (ph). And curiously, he was your therapist before you
became a partic -- started to write this book. And you write about
the sort of awkwardness of having a, quote, "post-therapy
relationship" with your therapist. And I wonder how you worked that
through. I mean, here's a guy who knew a lot about you. I don't know
how much you knew about him before you started this project.

SOLOTAROFF: Yeah. I wound up knowing a lot more about him than
I cared to, as a matter of fact, but that was much later. It was very
awkward. He did know me to, you know, the bottom of my bones. And
what was so powerful about him, aside from his kind of lucid
intelligence, was the fact that he was highly effective at putting the
wall up, and it was a very kind of intriguing wall because he was an
extremely stylish man, an extremely bright man, and that kind of
curiosity was, you know, a very sort of powerful part of the
transference.

But what complicated matters is that we were not only engaged in
a relationship, but a business association, and it was an association
that got very complicated as the process went on.

MOSS-COANE: Well, I would say, from reading the story -- and his
style is -- was confrontational. He had a kind of gruff exterior. He
didn't show a lot of his so-called -- or that, quote, unquote, "soft
side." And that this was a man who clearly had an ideology and
philosophy but was very much in control of what was going on and
seemed to enjoy the sort of power of leading a group.

SOLOTAROFF: If there's any word that describes his affect in the
room, it is authority. He's a very large man, a very physically
imposing character, and his intelligence is outsize. And you were
aware of this -- this kind of dominant presence in the room, even when
he went a half hour or 45 minutes without saying anything.

But when he did speak, it was with the -- you know, this power of
moral authority, and what he had to say was extremely canny and
thoughtful, but it was also bracing. He didn't spare feelings at any
time. In fact, part of his power consisted of his willingness to
inflict pain, to bring front and center the thing being avoided or the
thing being denied, resisted. And once he did it, it became very hard
to avoid or resist it.

MOSS-COANE: Help us understand how he ran a group. And maybe
it's unfair to even ask the kind of philosophy that he had, whether he
was, you know, more Freudian than he was Jungian or Rogerian or all
those various psychological philosophies, but -- I mean, he seemed to
be partially didactic. He was -- he was teaching people about, you
know, how emotions work and how people work, and then, obviously,
confrontationally therapeutic at the same time.

SOLOTAROFF: Yeah. He was this odd combination of, as you say,
the didact and the empath. And he did a lot of, you know, on-the-job
training, and the training that he tried to impart -- and succeeded in
at least a couple of cases -- was what I like to think of as adult
therapy.

As he says on several occasions in the book, most of the people
who came to him -- who come to him -- are "functionally unparented,"
meaning that whatever it is they're supposed to learn about being
adults from their mothers and fathers did not come through. And so
they were there as much to learn about how an adult makes judgments,
conducts himself or herself, discharges his or her responsibilities,
as they were to, you know, kind of unpack their history.

In fact, he was less interested in the history than he was in the
ways in which people did and did not function as adults in the here
and now.

MOSS-COANE: So there wasn't a lot of going back to early
childhood traumas, so to speak.

SOLOTAROFF: It probably took up, I don't know, 20 percent of the
actual talk time in group. Mostly what group consisted of was a very
rigorous inspection of the way people were behaving right now, the
ways they were destroying themselves at work or the ways that they
were handicapping themselves at home. These six people, I should say,
are extreme examples of the "New York winner type," all of them highly
effective, highly functional characters in their professional lives,
three or four of them quite famous, in fact, and for the most part,
utter disasters at home, making, you know, a wreck of their marriages,
of their parenting, of their relations with their own parents. And
that was what got most of the attention.

MOSS-COANE: Well, these were six people in a group. Again, they
all have pseudonyms, but one's a magazine editor, former model; one is
a Wall Street whiz kid, as you say, one a former rock-and-roll
musician -- problems with alcohol; one works for children's rights;
one is an accountant; and the other a former Broadway producer -- each
of them having, of course, the drama of their lives. What do you
think they had in common?

SOLOTAROFF: Well, I think what they mainly had in common was
that they had to act and act now or go off the cliff. They had all
arrived at a point in their lives when it was either change or die,
and if not die, then lose everything. A couple -- three of the people
in the group had already lost everything, either through addictions or
through a series of atrocious judgments had made utter shrift of
extremely successful careers and were now teetering on the verge of
bankruptcy, teetering on the verge of overdose. And it was that kind
of psychodynamic pressure that made that year in group so enormously
evocative and effective. I've sat in on groups where that kind of do-
or-die stake was not in effect and, you know, the outcomes are very
different. And what he did that I thought was so effective with this
group was populate it with these six people, none of whom could afford
to take a session off.
MOSS-COANE: My guest is Paul Solotaroff, author of "Group: Six
People In Search of a Life." More on group therapy after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(ID BREAK)

MOSS-COANE: Let's get back to Paul Solotaroff and his
observations watching six New Yorkers in group therapy.

The group seemed to be run as a series of monologues, where one
of the participants would talk about their life, and then with sort of
follow-up Q&A sessions, the very intense Q&A sessions, where either
Lathan himself or some of the other participants would ask and ask and
ask and ask.

SOLOTAROFF: Yeah. Actually, what he designed the group to be
was a series of these, as you say, monologues. So if the group ran
two and a half hours, you'd get three, perhaps four of these not
monologues, but interrogations.

MOSS-COANE: Yeah.

SOLOTAROFF: One person would sit in the hot seat, be interviewed
by another person in group. At the end of 20 minutes or so, the group
would then take over and begin to interrogate the witness, as it were.
And you know, it got awfully thick in there. The transference on the
part of the listeners was pretty -- was pretty severe.

So for instance, if Rex (ph), the 31-year-old whiz kid on Wall
Street, was talking about stalking his stripper girlfriend while his
beautiful blond wife was in hospital about to deliver their first
child, then Lena (ph), the child rights advocate who was being very
badly abused by her own husband and was trying to divorce him, got
furious at him and began to take him on for his derelictions of
responsibility. And those were very highly-charged sessions. And
there was screaming. There was tears and a lot of laughter.

MOSS-COANE: Yeah.

SOLOTAROFF: But a lot of that laughter was laughter in a
graveyard.

MOSS-COANE: Did you notice things like body language and who sat
next to whom and who made eye contact with whom and who crossed their
legs when So-and-So spoke up?

SOLOTAROFF: Sure. And what I paid close attention to were
alliances that formed, these kind of natural pairs. Six people, and
it did seem as though there were three kind of, you know, couples or
diads. You know, there were four men and two women. It did seem as
though, at the end of the day, each of these people was really talking
to one other person in that room. And that one other person, for
them, evoked a mother or a father, evoked a sibling that they hadn't
spoken to in 20 years, evoked in a couple of cases some earlier
version of themselves.
An example -- Rex, the Wall Street wunderkind, was a kind of
"before" picture of Jack, the 60-year-old ex-Broadway producer. Both
of them were extremely handsome, extremely charming, extremely
seductive characters. And Rex was Jack before he'd lost everything.
And so each of these guys looked across the room and saw the road
taken or, in Rex's case, the road about to be taken. And it was very,
very powerful.

MOSS-COANE: One of the participants, a person you called Dylan
(ph) -- and he's the musician, recovering alcoholic. He had a very
serious drinking problem and, in fact, dropped out of the group or
didn't come to a number of sessions early on. How did the group
handle that?

SOLOTAROFF: The group's instinct was to give him some leash but
not a mile. And when he disappeared after the first three or four
sessions, the initial reaction of the others was solicitude. I think
they were very concerned about him, and afraid. When he fell, he fell
very hard.

This is a guy who had been an enormously successful writer of TV
and film scores after about a 12- or 13-year career as a rock-and-roll
sideman playing with bands like the Doobie Brothers and being on tour
for most of his 20s and early 30s. And when he fell, he -- he was a
guy who drank a case of beer at a sitting, and he drank it slowly and
methodically. And I know that because I sat with him at bars, in his
horrible apartment way the hell over on 11th Avenue, watching him
drink himself into a stupor.

And when he came back, the first time there was a certain amount
of forgiveness and discretion. He dropped out three times, and each
of his disappearances was more and more disruptive. And by the second
time, the group was ready to drop-kick him. And Lathan urged them to
-- to forbear and forbear and forbear. And it became a very divisive
issue as the year transpired.

MOSS-COANE: Although you do write that by -- and again, you
know, without giving too much of the story away -- that by the middle
to the end of the session, that Dylan comes back and tries to work
very hard to make up for the lost time of the early portion of the
group.

SOLOTAROFF: Yes, he does. In fact, when Dylan comes back --
group begins in January, ends in December. And when Dylan comes back
in September, after a long summer break and, you know, stuns these
five other people not only by showing up but also by being alive -- it
had been widely assumed that he was dead or that he was living on a
bench in Port Authority. He worked as hard, if not harder, than
anybody in that room to make up for lost time and to earn himself, you
know, a place in the graces of these five other people.

MOSS-COANE: Paul Solotaroff's book is "Group: Six People In
Search of a Life." We'll continue our conversation in the second half
of the show.

I'm Marty Moss-Coane, and this is FRESH AIR.
(BREAK)

MOSS-COANE: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Marty Moss-Coane, in for
Terry Gross.

Let's get back to our conversation with Paul Solotaroff. He
spent a year observing six New Yorkers in group therapy and witnessed
the frustrations and breakthroughs that can happen in an intense
psychological encounter.

His book is "Group: Six People in Search of a Life."

When did you begin to see some changes? And, I mean, each of
these people came with their own story and had their own dramas to
deal with within the session. But at what point did you begin to see
that these personalities were beginning to move off that space they
had occupied so hard?

SOLOTAROFF: Well, as I said, there were these three sort of
couples in the group, not acknowledged and certainly not acted upon in
any kind of, you know, romantic or substantive way. But the first two
people in the group who really began to kind of emerge from this sort
of husk of suffering and paralysis.

The accountant, Peter, and Lena, the children's rights activist,
really began to kind of turn up as themselves, whereas versions -- as
truer versions of themselves, by about the summer. You began to see
them acting in very kind of dramatic ways to kind of reconfigure their
lives.

Lena had been trying for two and a half years to divorce herself
from an extremely wealthy man who was using the legal process to
destroy her financially, very wealthy, she was not. And he was trying
to break her. And the group really kind of empowered her to take the
fight on and not be this kind of, you know, whipping girl for this,
you know, sort of wealthy thug.

By the end of the summer, the other two who really kind of emerge
as winners in this group began to kind of get it, and one of the
things you see in group is that there's a lot of measuring going on,
there's a lot of comparing. Generally there are two or three people
who really kind of lead the way in terms of their ability and their
willingness to get going. And it's their momentum, it's their
seriousness that brings the others along.

And as "Group" makes clear, not everybody, you know, makes it
into the winner's circle. Of these six people, it's probably fair to
say that four come out significantly of where they started, and that
two don't, and those are pretty good odds.

MOSS-COANE: What was the last session like? And these were
sessions -- and this was a series of therapy sessions that went for a
prescribed period of time. It wasn't endless group therapy.

SOLOTAROFF: That's right. One of the things that Lathan (ph)
did to ensure that these sessions were as packed, as intense, as
crowded as they were was to set a clock, and the clock was this
limited number of sessions. It started out as 20, and, for detailed
reasons, wound up at 25.

But each member knew that he or she had a prescribed period of
time to get well or get out. And that last session, which ran over
three hours, was an extraordinary piece of theater in which everything
that had not been said got said that night. Animuses, jealousies, you
know, empathies that had been implicit were very much made explicit
that night.

And the big surprise of the evening was the way the group took on
the therapist, with their own dissatisfactions and score-settling.
And it was a night (INAUDIBLE)

MOSS-COANE: It's interesting, because -- was that planned, do
you think, by the group? Do you think they had been secretly talking
about the therapist? Or was there something just spontaneous about
this last session in which the first person turning to Lathan -- and
they did take him on, they really went after him.

SOLOTAROFF: Yes, they laid him out.

MOSS-COANE: Yes.

SOLOTAROFF: No, it wasn't planned. In fact, it was, you know,
just a couple of, you know, sort of stray comments that opened the
door to the sort of outpouring of -- I don't know, hurt, frustration.

MOSS-COANE: What did they accuse him of?

SOLOTAROFF: Of not paying attention, of proselytizing, of making
the class -- making the sessions half tutorial and half therapy, of
demogoguing, of hogging the airwaves. He was a guy who had a lot to
say, and unfortunately often granted himself the space in which to say
it. And in limited time, you know, it not only breaks momentum, but
it also, you know, monopolizes time that's needed by these other six
people.

And they let him know it, they let him know it.

MOSS-COANE: Yes, and how did he take it?

SOLOTAROFF: He took it hard. He also took it to heart. But
what they were responding to was more than simply design errors or
errors of egotism. And one of the things that comes across very
vividly in the book is Lathan's grandiosity.

They were also expressing their profound unease with the changes
that occur in him over the year. And those changes are very sudden,
very shocking, and had to do with the way he dressed, a radical change
of environs. He moved from this wonderful office in the West Village
to this very grandiose gallery that looked like a kind of, you know,
coronation of himself, and...

MOSS-COANE: Complete with his own sculptures that he'd made,
right?
SOLOTAROFF: His own sculpture and his own paintings, which was
an extreme lapse of judgment on his part. These paintings of his were
very revealing and distracting, and the group let him know it in that
last session.

MOSS-COANE: He had been your therapist. Do you think lesser of
him now, or do you just feel like you have a more complete picture of
who you were dealing with?

SOLOTAROFF: Well, I do have a more complete picture, and I'm not
sure I'm grateful for that. As I say, part of his power derived from
his inscrutability. I mean, this is a guy who dressed all in black,
was this kind of towering physical presence in the room. And part of
his moral authority was the impermeability of his own persona. You
were dying to know more about him, and a lot of our, you know, post-
session gabfests had to do with speculation about his sex life and
about his, you know, you know, his recreational activities.

And so by betraying more of himself, his quotidian, you know,
private self to these people, I think he did kind of demythologize
himself in ways that were not adaptive, that were not useful.

MOSS-COANE: Watching this group for a year, did it make you want
to go back into group therapy?

SOLOTAROFF: It made me never want to set foot in a room with a
therapist again.

MOSS-COANE: You're cured, eh?

SOLOTAROFF: It made me want to write my next book about flowers,
or about fruit, about something without a set of lawyers, without a
set of pathologies.

Yes, I mean, you know, sure, that kind of, you know, sort of
momentum and narrative is -- and also community. You know, I mean,
that group, in spite of the fact that they didn't, you know, trade
numbers and go see movies and ball games together, was for those two
and a half hours extremely intimate with one another. And that kind
of intimacy is what so many of us dearly seek and feel so sorely
lacking in our lives.

So, yes, there was a kind of ambivalence. But this experience,
this four-and-a-half-year journey, was so torturous for me that it's
not something that I wish to repeat in any form now or in the
immediate future.

MOSS-COANE: Well, Paul Solotaroff, I want to thank you very much
for joining us today on FRESH AIR.

SOLOTAROFF: Thank you so much.

MOSS-COANE: Paul Solotaroff is the author of "Group: Six People
in Search of a Life."

Coming up, counseling farm families.
This is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Marty Moss-Coane, Philadelphia, PA
Guest: Paul Solotaroff
High: Journalist Paul Solotaroff discusses his new book, "Group: Six
People In Search of a Life," that follows the progress of a group in
therapy in New York City.
Spec: Paul Solotaroff; "Group: Six People In Search Of A Life";
Health And Medicine; New York City

Please note, this is not the final feed of record
Copy: Content and programming copyright 1999 WHYY, Inc. All rights
reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc.
Formatting copyright 1999 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes
from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without
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whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: "Six People in Search of a Life": an Interview with Paul
Solotaroff

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: AUGUST 10, 1999
Time: 12:00
Tran: 081002NP.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Listening to Farmers: An Interview with Michael Rosmann
Sect: News; Domestic
Time: 12:35

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

MARTY MOSS-COANE, HOST: This summer has been hard on the
nation's farmers. In the East, the drought has stunted many crops,
and unless there's a lot of rain soon, there won't be much of a
harvest this year.

In the Midwest, the prices for livestock, corn, and beans have
dropped dramatically, which could ruin many farmers, some of whom are
working land that's been in the family for generations.

My guest, Dr. Michael Rosmann, is a fourth-generation farmer who
raises cattle in Harlan, Iowa. He's also a clinical psychologist
whose practice is made up of farmers and their families. They come to
him for help in dealing with the uncertainties of today's farm
economy.

Rosmann is also the director of the Sharing Help Awareness United
Network, that's an organization that provides support to families who
experience an injury or even death due to a farm accident.

I asked Michael Rosmann to describe the ways that stress tends to
show up in farm families.

MICHAEL ROSMANN, PH.D., CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST: It does typically
follow a pattern. Often the symptoms begin to show up in the form of
increased apprehension and anxiety, to begin with. The farmer and
other persons in the family may have a foreboding sense that the
prices or the crop yields are both aren't going to be sufficient to
cover the expenses. Often that anxiety begins to merge into a sense
of depression, a sense of almost helplessness in the face of factors
that they can't control.

We often see problems develop with insomnia, sometimes with
psychosomatic outbreak of symptoms that reflect stress. In some
instances, persons may withdraw from their usual social endeavors.
They may in some instances verbalize their own plight to other
farmers, but often they don't say very much to persons who are outside
of the farming occupation.

MOSS-COANE: Do you see farmers with panic attacks? I mean,
does...

ROSMANN: (INAUDIBLE)

MOSS-COANE: ... the anxiety get to level, where they really are
in this heightened state of anxiety?

ROSMANN: Yes, that's actually a common occurrence, where a
telephone call may trigger a panic reaction for fear that it is a
creditor or a banker who is calling to inquire about the farming
operation. In some instances, persons become almost paralyzed and
unable to check the mailbox for fear that they may find a letter or a
notice that they don't wish to receive.

MOSS-COANE: Do you see more drinking, problems with drinking?

ROSMANN: That's interesting. We do see more persons turning to
alcohol and other substance misuse. Sometimes we see cocaine and
amphetamines as the substances that are misused in rural areas and on
the farm. And it's interesting why that occurs. They're harder to
detect, whereas alcohol shows very obvious signs, and it's easily
detectable through breathalyzers and so forth.

But cocaine and amphetamines are more difficult to detect, and
sometimes they give a farmer who is under stress the kind of boost
that he or she thinks they need in order to keep operating the
machinery during long hours.

So substance abuse does increase, but it is not usually the
primary symptom. The primary symptom is typically interpersonal
discord or anxiety or depression.

MOSS-COANE: As you talk about these problems that farmers have
been having, I'm thinking about how different that is from many of the
problems that would bring someone to a psychologist's office, many of
those problems being a kind of external problem. Maybe you didn't
feel that you were loved enough as a child. What you're talking about
are really external problems, problems out of people's control.

ROSMANN: That is a very keen perception, and it's accurate,
because most farmers do not have serious, chronic mental health
issues. These are typically situational. They're brought about by
stresses at the times, usually economic or, in some instances, you
know, there may be pressures from lenders and so forth that we'd call
social stressors.

But we don't see people with psychotic illnesses who are also
farming much because persons with these type of debilitating mental
health issues have been sorted out. People with personality issues
seldom are engaged in farming. I've yet to see a person with
borderline personality disorder who's also farming.

MOSS-COANE: Right. Be pretty hard to be a farmer, wouldn't it,
with borderline personality disorder?

ROSMANN: Well, I would think so.

MOSS-COANE: Yes. So you're talking about healthy people in
crisis, essentially.

ROSMANN: Yes, absolutely.
MOSS-COANE: How do you help a farmer, I guess, get over that
initial reluctance to seek help, especially seek the help of a
psychologist?

ROSMANN: It's important that the farmer feel that he or she can
talk to someone who understands the operation of the farm. Farmers
will talk to other farmers. They will also talk to professionals who
understand farming. And I should say ranching, because basically when
I refer to farmers, I'm also referring to any person who's in the food
production system.

It's important for farmers and ranchers to feel that they are
understood, and often there is an immediate bond by talking with a
psychologist or social worker or psychiatrist who grew up on the farm
or who may be living on the farm at the present time. It saves a lot
of groundwork, so to speak.

It isn't always imperative, but it helps to break down the
barriers that, in many cases, keep people from seeking help.

MOSS-COANE: If you're invited, then, or go out to a farm, a
ranch, to talk to a farmer, we'll say, in crisis, what, you might
stand in his field with him, or perhaps go someplace on the farm
that's quiet and comfortable and familiar?

ROSMANN: Yes. We'll do it on his terms, whatever is going to
help that person feel a sense of privacy and maybe allow for
conditions to help him verbalize what's troubling him.

MOSS-COANE: Do you find in doing therapy with farmers and
ranchers that you then need different kind of metaphors, different
kind of language to be able to communicate?

ROSMANN: Yes, we do. Sometimes we use the language that is
common in the area. You know, we may use a term to identify mother
pigs giving birth. We call that farrowing. And when I say, "Well,
you know, how's the farrowing average this spring or this summer?"
immediately, the person who's raising hogs knows what's going on, and
they know that, you know, I am familiar with that, at least. I grew
up raising hogs. So it's something I'm comfortable with.

MOSS-COANE: So you can speak this common language.

ROSMANN: Yes.

MOSS-COANE: Well, I want to talk some more, but first we have to
take a short break. And our guest today on FRESH AIR is psychologist
and cattle farmer Dr. Michael Rosmann. We'll be back after a short
break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

MOSS-COANE: My guest is psychologist and cattle farmer Dr.
Michael Rosmann.
I would think, as a psychologist, if you're talking about
problems outside of anyone's control at this point, whether it's the
farm prices or the weather, that there's really a limit to how much
help you can give somebody.

ROSMANN: I think it's important to distinguish what are the
causes of the problems and who controls them from who has the control
over the solutions. While farmers may not have a great deal of
control over the causes of the farming disaster, we may have some
control over how we respond to it.

For example, we still can talk with one another instead of
isolating ourselves. We can band together to figure out maybe if we
can pool our efforts to keep the farm operation going. It's possible
for us in some instances to organize a number of people and to talk
about the farm problem or maybe to write congresspeople, or maybe to
write a letter that expresses the needs of a number of people to have
a better market in the area, or maybe to encourage economic
development in the community.

These facts, or these approaches, give hope to persons who
otherwise feel that they're unable to control the factors that affect
their farming operation.

MOSS-COANE: Does it also give them a sense that they are not
alone in this problem?

ROSMANN: Very much, very much so. And that's so important,
because when one feels that his problem or her problem is perceived
and recognized by others, it helps to break down the sense of
isolation, the sense of, I'm having to take all this burden by myself.
It's important to share the common experience, and that's a bond.

So I think that we do not have full understanding from many
persons who affect the price of food. For example, many farmers feel
frustrated that consumers do not fully recognize the depths of the
problem in the farm economy. There's also some perception that maybe
certain government officials do not fully appreciate the difficulties
with the farm economy.

So it is important that farmers band together with others who
have a common understanding, a common experience, and may also have
some knowledge of what can be done to solve the problem.

MOSS-COANE: Farming is a very dangerous occupation, perhaps one
of the most dangerous in the country.

ROSMANN: Farming is the most dangerous major occupation in our
country.

MOSS-COANE: You lost a foot, or part of a foot, to a farming
accident.

ROSMANN: Oh, I caught my foot in an auger in a combine and lost
three toes on my right foot. It was a powerful lesson.

MOSS-COANE: What happened?

ROSMANN: Well, on July 28, 1990, we were starting to combine
oats. There were a few soybeans in the hopper from the previous year,
and I wanted to get the soybeans out of the hopper so that the oats
that we were combining would be free of any foreign matter, and
soybeans, in this case, would be, you know, foreign matter.

So I crawled into the hopper and pushed the remaining soybeans
into the auger. I asked my helper to start the auger and unload them.
And there was one little dab of beans that were still down by the
auger, and I pushed my foot toward them, and it all happened in a
second. It -- my foot started going up the auger, and I must have
jerked my foot out with great force, because I tore the heavy fiber
and lug (ph) sole from the bottom of my shoe completely off the -- my
shoe.

MOSS-COANE: So you...

ROSMANN: And then the front of my foot was missing.

MOSS-COANE: So it was instantly just cut off right there.

ROSMANN: Right there. I knew instantaneously what was going on
and what the message was for me. The very first impression was, when
I saw the front of my shoe missing, or the remainder of my shoe, I
thought, Oh, a few stitches, and I can keep going. The next
instantaneous thought was, Uh-oh, it's worse than that. And then the
next immediate sensation was, Oh, God, I know what you're trying to
tell me.

And I jumped out of the hopper, and I was on the ground in two
seconds, and then it took several weeks and months for the whole
lesson to sink in.

MOSS-COANE: What was the lesson that you learned?

ROSMANN: There were several. One lesson was to not try to do
too much, but to pace myself, and to take time to recreate, to slow
down, to think clearly and carefully. Another lesson was to examine
my motives for doing things. I felt there was a need to get my life
centered, to become more spiritual in my commitment, to understand
that there is a higher power that has control over me and my
livelihood.

MOSS-COANE: You raise cattle now. Do you find that relieves
some of the stress of working as a therapist?

ROSMANN: It certainly does. I like my cows very much, and they
seem to like me. And it's fun to be around cattle. We have an
understanding. They don't talk back. They work together. I depend
on them, they depend on me. And I like physical labor, I like it when
I can throw hay bales. It's a great release for me. It helps me to
clear my own mind. It's -- I can even meditate while I'm undertaking
physical labor or working on the tractor.

MOSS-COANE: Michael Rosmann, I want to thank you very much for
joining us today on FRESH AIR.

ROSMANN: Well, thank you. It was a pleasure.

MOSS-COANE: Michael Rosmann is a cattle farmer and clinical
psychologist in Harlan, Iowa.

(MUSICAL BRIDGE)

Today's senior producer was Roberta Shirok (ph). Our engineer
was Bob Purdick (ph). Dorothy Fairby (ph) is our administrative
assistant. Research provided by Sam Adams.

For Terry Gross, I'm Marty Moss-Coane.

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Marty Moss-Coane, Philadelphia, PA
Guest: Michael Rosmann
High: Psychologist and fourth-generation farmer Michael Rosmann
listens to the problems of other struggling farmers. Rosmann
discusses the health and business problems facing drought-stricken
farmers in the American Midwest.
Spec: Agriculture; Sharing Help Awareness United Network; Business;
Health And Medicine

Please note, this is not the final feed of record

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End-Story: Listening to Farmers: An Interview with Michael Rosmann
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