Troubled people meet

This repeat of a program from two years earlier demonstrates how patients in group therapy help each other. Dr. Jerome Frank, professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, explains that patients with psychoneuroses have emotional symptoms that often manifest themselves in biological symptoms. Psychotherapy helps them discover what their real problems are and how to overcome or cope with them. In group therapy, five to seven people of both genders discuss their problems. A doctor is present, listening and asking occasional questions, but he never gives advice or answers patients' questions. For this program, the staff of Hopkins' Phipps Psychiatric Clinic role play a therapy group based on disguised but actual records of patients' various issues. In this "laboratory of living," many of the patients discover that others have problems similar to theirs and therefore feel less isolated and more normal.