BOOK LAUNCH
for Dr. CAROLYN QUADRIO
Women Working and Training in Australian Psychiatry
Readings Bookshop, 11th October, 2001
by BRIAN STAGOLL
[For more information about Carolyn, the interview with her by Dr. Kasia
Kozowskla “Feminism and Beyond”, A.N.Z.J. Family Therapy, March 2000,
vol.21, No. 1, pp22-28, is strongly recommended.]
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Welcome and thank you everyone for coming.
We are here to celebrate and launch Dr. Carolyn Quadrio’s new book “Women
Working and Training in Australian Psychiatry”, her survey and analysis of the
social, cultural and professional situation of women in our field, and how
gender frames and defines the work and the learning of psychiatry.
I’m greatly honoured to be asked to launch this book. It is a ground-breaking
work issuing a challenge to Australian psychiatry that can only be ignored at a
cost to all of us. It is both the beginning and the end of a long struggle that
Carolyn has led that has redefined, and must keep on redefining Australian
psychiatry if we are to deal with the deep crisis in our profession.
I met Carolyn at our first Australian Family Therapy Conference in 1980, and
I’ve been caucusing and learning with her at nearly every Family Therapy
Conference since. I recently saw her again last month at our 22nd Family
Therapy Conference, where we were about the only psychiatrists still going.
Family Therapy was challenged and reshaped by the women’s movement in the
1980s. Its response was rather belated, but it was still a long way ahead of
when Australian Psychiatry woke up from its patriarchal slumbers.
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In 1988 Carolyn wrote a letter to the College journal about a recent College
Congress and World Psychiatric Association meeting. She noted the sparse
attendance at sessions on torture, refugees and Aborigines; the extravagant
promotion of Lithium (asking, presciently, would we be so prodigal in 15 years
time!) and the complete absence of women as plenary or invited speakers or
chairs.
In response, the Editor of the Journal announced the next Congress would have
the theme: “there’s nothing sooner dry than women’s tears”, an obscure quote
from the Elizabethan playwright John Webster This was meant to emphasise
“the resilience of women in the face of adversity”. A storm of protest followed,
some initiated from people here tonight: but not the gentleman who called
Carolyn “a paranoid anti-narco-therapeutic feminist with popular socialist
themes”!
The Editor then tried to slide away, proclaiming his innocence and noting he
enjoyed the “ebullient way Carolyn stated her ideas”, but adding that “no doubt
Dr. Stagoll would still find my saying so to be reeking of paternalism”. He was
not wrong there, at least.
Out of this crystallised the Women in Psychiatry Group in Melbourne, leading
to a number of changes in the College which are detailed in Carolyn’s book.
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However, as the official College history itself notes “how long genuine gender
equality might take to achieve is a more debatable matter”. (Incidentally,
Carolyn is not included in the index, even though she gets half a page in the
book!)
It was also in 1989 Carolyn proposed an M.D. on Women in Psychiatry to the
University of N.S.W. School of Psychiatry. This was rejected, with hints that
Carolyn was “querulous and paranoid”. The Women’s Studies Department of
the University of Sydney was more open to scholarship and the advance of
knowledge and so Carolyn started her Ph.D. The result is this book, twelve
years later.
So here we have a story of resilience and tears on one side, paranoia and
projections of ebullience on the other. If we ever needed evidence that the
personal is political, here we have it. We also have an inspiring example of how
the personal was made political by Carolyn’s work.
I mean political in the sense of organising and cumulatively chipping away at
an issue by persisting and enduring : the sense that Max Weber meant when he
called “politics the slow boring of hard boards”. Carolyn’s has made the
personal political in this book by an immense and resilient labour of many kinds
: empirical and reflective, theoretical and statistical, empathic and critical,
passionate and tearful. In short, the book embodies all those qualities that
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make up the difficult and complex activity of psychiatry at its very best and
which Carolyn demonstrates she is still a true believer in.. She has endured and
succeeded over the long haul. Her vision and openness are the exact opposite
of paranoia.
Mind you this book is not easy reading. It is certainly written in a plain,
unadorned style that makes the span of feminist scholarship from Chesler to
Mitchell, from Chodorow and Gilligan, and from Elizabeth Grosz and Jane
Ussher illuminatingly accessible. And for those of us who like one liners, each
section is headed by striking epigrams and extracts.
But as Jane Ussher says in her polished foreword, the book makes for sober
reading. If this is the current state of Australian psychiatry, it is a gloomy
prospect. But the evidence is there, patiently collated from Medicare data,
questionnaires and interviews of 338 respondents. I hope you will study this
material carefully. Perhaps you will ask the same questions I do.
 Why do we accept a culture of psychiatry that seems so detrimental to
ourselves and our patients?
 Why do we accept a psychiatric culture that is so hazardous and ethically
catastrophic for male psychiatrists?
 Why do our trainee programs have to be so grim, inflexible and competitive?
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 Why do our structures end up being so devaluing of the caring and nurturing
and relational aspects of our, and our patients, lives?
These are not new questions. Indeed in the past year two American books
bring up the same issues: Tanya Luhrmann “Of Two Minds : the Growing
Disorder in American Psychiatry”, and Hobson and Leonard’s “Out of it’s
Mind. Psychiatry in Crisis; A call for reform”.
As with Carolyn they focus on what Luhrmann calls “divided consciousness”:,
the split between neurobiological and psychosocial/therapeutic approaches,
with the dominance of one being at the expense of the other. The result: a
deskilling of caretaking , the loss of our capacity to negotiate and maintain
extended interactions; the inability to address emotions that can sometimes be
(in a recent phrase about New York ) “ too big to have”.
Yet in these other books the words gender, feminism and women do not appear
in the index. It is Carolyn who adds the crucial variable of gender to
discussions of “ the crisis”. This is what is most important about her book.
And, ironically it may be the development of feminist psychiatry that will save
psychiatry itself from extinction.
40% of trainees in psychiatry are now women. They are likely to follow the
women psychiatrists, who as Carolyn shows, practice a style of psychiatry that
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more readily embraces so called “ softer”, more relational approaches, and
delicately balances them with bio medicine and neuro science. If we are to
maintain such complexity, and not lose contact with our great healing traditions,
we must welcome and hold onto what feminism offers.
We all owe Carolyn a debt for showing us this, and pointing to where we can go
on from here.
So read this book and promote its ideas. Join Hope, Love and Beauty and their
three cupids (on the covers) as they vanquish Time, in Simon Voeut’s French
court painting of 1627, a work that foreshadows the Enlightenment and the
French Revolution.
It is in this spirit that I launch Carolyn’s book.
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