From Mustard Plasters to Psychotherapy
and Beyond

by Gary Lakes

When I was growing up during the Great Depression, whatever illnesses I may have suffered were treated with mustard plasters, sodium bicarbonate or milk of magnesia. I vividly recall my mother saying:  you've got a cold, so what will it be--mustard plasters, bicarbonate of soda or milk of magnesia?  I suppose the choice was dictated by which end of me was the more distressed.  These cures were cheap, proven, and always at hand.  I came to think that these homely remedies were magical because they cured everything that befell me.  When I asked my mother why they were never put to use on my father's hangovers, she just shrugged and looked away.

After I became a married student on the educational GI Bill at Harvard, I became a more sophisticated consumer and bought a few over-the-counter medications.  All I ever suffered from were colds and thought-provoked headaches that arose from the need to consider the meaning of life as expounded in various classes whose professors' idols were Plato, Aristotle, and Henry Kissinger.  Aspirin was quick, cheap and effective.

Suitably credentialed after two more degrees of learning, I got my first job as an instructor in economics at DePauw at the going 1955 salary of $4,000 annually.  I was now with wife and child; we endured occasional nasal congestion and there appeared on our bodies various rashes.  Our doctor said these illnesses were not colds.  We must be allergic to something.  I could afford the many tests that the detection of allergies required and the doctor informed us that my wife, my son and I were allergic to chocolate, dog dander, cat dander, and aspirin.  Since we owned neither dog nor cat and ate little chocolate, my only concern was with having to abandon the comfort of aspirin.

With promotion to assistant professor in 1954 and, at length, a salary of over $6,000, our disabilities left the body and entered the head.  It was no longer colds, headaches, and allergies that beset us.  My wife suggested that our problems of familial discomfort were psychic and what we now needed was psychotherapy.  The therapist we attended said our trouble was repressed memories of real or imagined childhood traumas that were making our lives miserable.  We were in denial, our self-images were tainted and we did not know how to relate.

When, in 1964, I left teaching and took a job as an economic consultant at the then hefty salary of over $20,000 I should have anticipated that, with growing affluence, I would have another expensive change of illnesses.  But, no.  The Furies had decided that I was to be permitted to hold on to the psychotherapy while moving closer to the need for a triple by-pass of my coronary arteries.  I had good medical coverage and could afford both the therapy and the by-pass and so succumbed to both.

From my experience I have learned that you get the illnesses you can afford, which, of course, is not to deny that some people get illnesses they cannot afford.

Much older now, if not wiser, I find myself in reasonably good health.  I don't suffer colds, headaches, allergies, or a tainted self-image.  But the malaise that Jimmy Carter proposed as the trouble with Americans has, like Poe's Raven, lighted on my bust.  And so, it is not my mind or body that is in default but my uneasy soul.  What, do you suppose, will be the cost of treatment for this condition?

Copyright © Gary Lakes 2003