REMARKS BY MIKE GORMAN

TESTIMONIAL DINNER

 

January 25, 1972

National Press Club -- Washington, D. C.

"Not enough doctors, not enough nurses, not enough toilet

paper, not enough covers for cold nights. When the laundry did

not get around to the wards in time, there were not enough sheets

and not enough pillow cases. There wasn't enough of anything

but patients."

As I stand here tonight, I cannot feel or believe that I wrote these words more
than a quarter of a century ago to describe conditions in the largest mental hospital in
Oklahoma. In that first story, having told the readers of our newspaper of a snake pit
incarcerating 3,300 sufferers from mental illness ina human warehouse of locked cells,
nakedness, and indescribable despair, I felt that my immediate task had been completed.

Returning to my task of reporting the bizarre annual antics of the Oklahoma
legislature, I could not drive from my mind the anguished cries of the patients at
Central State. Who were they? Why were they there? Why did no one -- not even mem-
bers of their own family -- come to visit them? Why was all of this inhumanity so hidden
from the public?

These nagging questions led me to return to Central State and then to visit the
other mental hospitals in Oklahoma. This time, I checked for details on the past histories

and travails of the inmates. I felt somewhat like Lazarus raising the dead -- giving flesh,

bones and meaning to people who had been buried alive.
page two

Not a trained archeologist, I probed through layer upon layer to reconstruct the
identities of these inhabitants of the Lost City of the Mad. I turned up doctors, lawyers,
school teachers and, interestingly, seven former members of the Oklahoma legislature.

I wasn't too surprised, because I knew that many more just as crazy were outside running
the legislature in 1946.

But having found the lost city -- and many other lost cities of the mad as I journeyed
through a sub-continent of despair from state to state -- how could we bring a half million
people out of the shadows? How expose what in my later writings I often referred to as the
twin conspiracies of silence and distance which had relegated millions of our people to
physical and psychological bondage since Colonial times.

I then thought of an obituary I had written in 1945 on a prominent Oklahoma doctor,
I checked the hospital; they gave me the usual "after a long illness" bit. I wasn't satisfied,
so I checked several doctor friends of his and mine. They admitted, after repeated
questioning, that he had died of cancer. I wrote the obit, including the precise cause of
death. The next day the obituary appeared without the word ''cancer' init. Quite annoyed,
I went to the city editor and protested. He replied that he was following a national policy
of the media that we would not attribute any death to cancer. It had a stigmatizing con-
notation and it terrified family, friends and the general public. I asked him how we could
combat this obviously frightening disease if the people remained in widespread ignorance:
of its decimating impact. He shrugged his shoulders.

After months of thrashing about, I now had a perceived focus. I would try, with
the limited talents at my disposal, to break the even heavier stigma enveloping mental
illness by pounding the hard facts home not only to our readers, but to every elected official

in the land whose past indifference was contributory to the present outrage.
page three

I heeded well the admonition of slavery's greatest foe, William Lloyd Garrison:
"J will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising
as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak,
or write, with moderation...Urge me not to use moderation
in a cause like the present. Iam iin earnest. I will not
equivocate; I will not excuse; I will not retreat a single inch;
and I will be heard."

In the brief timespan alloted to me by the impressarios of this non-partisan
benefit, I cannot enumerate all of the exciting events leading to a revolutionary change
of attitude toward the mentally ill in America. However, I cannot pass by the enormous
contributions of the Governors of the several states starting in the late 1940's, At their
annual conferences, largely devoted in past years to farm-to-market roads, the fate of
the Air National Guard and other world shaking issues, they now gave us a prominent
place at the head table. The several historic studies mandated by the National Governors'
Conference and carried out so ably by the Council of State Governments exposed the
bankruptcy and inhumanity of custodial institutions and led to the creation by Congress
in 1955 of the Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Health. The report of that
Commission provided the foundation for President John F. Kennedy's magnificent
mental health message in 1963, in which he called for the eventual abolition of the
custodial state hospital system and its replacement by a network of mental health centers
in the heart of the community.

We are in the beginning stages of this new revolution, but we can already point
to aNalmost 50 percent drop in patients confined in state mental hospitals. In an era
when there is much talk of the decline of responsive government, it is appropriate to note

that here federal and state governments listened to the voice of the people and forged one

of America's finest hours in the whole area of human services.
page four

Twenty years ago, I wrote what I thought was a pretty good magazine piece on
the anatomy of the crusader. From the comfortable vantage point of additional experience
and retrospect, I would nowalter that profile considerably.

First of all, you have to be slightly mad because the landscape you traverse is
both uncertain and impossibly steep; as you climb the first mountain and take a deep
breath of satisfaction, you look ahead and there is a much higher one right in front of you.

You must cultivate patience -- a very difficult virtue for a hot-blooded Irishman.
It is a discipline which can only be acquired. I remember vividly a long conversation I
had with Lord Lister Hill in 1951. I was then working for Mr. Truman as Director of a
Presidential Commission on the Health Needs of the Nation and moonlighting on a bill
for aid to medical education which Senator Hill had first introduced in 1949. We were
decisively defeated on the floor of the Senate that year, and I reminded the great Senator
from Alabama that two years of very hard work had gone down the drain. He replied that
we had just fired the opening salvo. We would prevail eventually only if we pursued the
issue with undiminished determination. In 1963, 14 years after the advent of the legislation,
the Congress passed the first significant bill providing federal aid for the training of health
professionals.

I am now deeply and happily involved in the battle for national health insurance. We
lost the first round 20 years ago, but we are back now with enormously increased public
support, and there is no doubt that this time we will prevail.

In this crusading game, I suppose you have to have an affinity for seemingly lost

causes: Mental illness, population control, health insurance, the conquest of cancer, the
page five

eradication of the common cold, the seven-year itch (which the NIH can now cure in eight
years), and so on through the litany of man's afflictions in his voyage upon this planet.
Above all, you have to possess an irrepressible desire to participate actively in
this arduous experiment which our Founding Fathers launched on these shores two
centuries ago.
I share the faith of Professor Thomas Woodrow Wilson who, two decades before

assuming the Presidency of these United States, observed that:

"Democratic institutions are never done -- they
are, like the living tissue, always a-making. Itisa
strenuous thing, this of living the life of a free people:
and we cannot escape the burden of our inheritance."

In this little city on George Washington's Potomac, we live this strenuous life
and, oddly enough, most of us enjoy it.

Iam profoundly grateful to all of you here tonight -- and many more of our good
people throughout the land for allowing me to march with you in a variety of exciting
crusades. I treasure the experiences, I cherish the memories, but most of all, I value
the warm personal contacts and friendships -- even those with the members of the greatest
deliberative body between Annapolis to the north and Richmond to the south.

You renew and invigorate my faith. Frankly, it doesn't need much invigorating
for 1am a kindred spirit with the engineer Charles Kettering who once observed that:

'No disease is incurable; it only seems so because of

the ignorance of man,"
page six

Since a testimonial is somewhat of a premature obituary -- and I trust this one
is very premature -- I indulged ina bit of fantasy about what I would like on my tombstone.

It would go something along these lines:

Here lies (thrashing about and trying to break loose)
Citizen Mike Gorman
Who, though possessed of quite ordinary talents,
Rose up and did battle for those of his fellow citizens who
could not speak for themselves.
In so doing, he helped in a small way to deepen the

compassionate wellsprings of this democracy.

- 30-