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VOL. 5, NO. 52
karns / hardin valley
DECEMBER 26, 2011
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Blast off!
Great grads Sandra Clark says each grad from the Kelley Academy has a story to tell. See page A-5
STEM English teacher Meshon Crateau explains the rules (“You may not catch the rocket”) before blastoff at Hardin Valley Academy. Helping are students Alex Hamlin (at left) and Jacob Smiley. Story and more pictures on A-2. Photo by S. Clark
Ol’ Vols rally for Bud Ford Marvin West says former Vols are battling to keep Bud Ford as UT’s athletic historian. See page A-8
FEATURED COLUMNIST JAKE MABE
Winter getaway Turns out December is a great time to head to Townsend and Cades Cove. See page A-6
Commission honors Mike Banks Commissioner Tony Norman (right) reads from a proclamation honoring Mike Banks for nearly 36 years of service with the West Knox Utility District. Banks, the utility’s general manager, is retiring Jan. 1. Photo by L. Van Guilder
Former Lakeshore chaplain witness to changes By Betty Bean
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“When the news came out that they wanted to close it, somebody asked me what I thought, and I said they really closed Lakeshore 15 years ago,” said the Rev. George Doebler, who came to Tennessee in 1972 to become chaplain at Eastern State Hospital and stayed there for 13 tumultuous years. He’s still in Knoxville, and although he formally retired in 2007, the ordained Lutheran minister is still spending three days a week in his office at the University of Tennessee Medical Center. Next to his door, there’s a photograph of a priest blessing the hounds at a foxhunt, unaware of the dog that has sneaked up behind him to lift a leg against the cleric’s vestments. Doebler doesn’t take himself too seriously. But he has lived through serious times. For example, before he started his clinical training program at St. Elizabeth’s, a huge, federally funded psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., he took a detour through the Dallas County, Ala., jail. It happened like this: “Dr. Martin Luther King had been down in Selma (Alabama) registering voters. We’re sitting in an ethics class (in Dubuque, Iowa) saying ‘What do you do with
this?’ One guy said, ‘We’ve got to go down there.’ So we decided to go for three days to show our support for King. We got down there and got thrown in jail.” Doebler and his friends ran into King on the street, and he asked them why George Doebler Photo by Betty Bean they had come. “We told him it was be- changes were coming, dictatcause of his speech. And he ed by the Community Mental said ‘What I said caused you Health Care Act, championed to come here?’ by John F. Kennedy, which “He thanked us for being had passed in 1963. there. He was just a little guy, Doebler and psychiatrist not very tall. We slept in the John Marshall, who later bell tower of the church and became the superintendent listened to him preach every of Eastern State Hospital in night. He could really preach. Knoxville, pioneered commuVery well trained. Some nity mental health at St. Elizapeople look at you, and they beth’s. Doebler’s wife, Nancy, look straight through your was a psychiatric nurse there, head. That’s how he was. He as well. was one of those people who Not long before Marshall comes at a certain time, and took the helm at Eastern the time is ready. Three weeks State, the hospital was rocked later, I was in Washington and by a devastating exposé that missed my first interview at brought attention to the deSt. Elizabeth’s.” plorable conditions there. AlOnce he got there, Doe- though funding was always bler found that practices like an issue, with the encouragehydrotherapy – whereby pa- ment of reform-minded Comtients were strapped into a missioner Richard Treadway chair and bombed by a water and the help of new medicacannon shooting high velocity tions and treatment methstreams – were still in use. But ods, Marshall started making
progress. Doebler was soon training clergy to do aftercare and eventually had 20 to 30 pastors working with him. But in 1975, Ray Blanton was elected and everything got hard. “Blanton was using those jobs as political payoff. I told him we couldn’t do it, that we had a job description and strict requirements, and Treadway stuck with us. By 1978, we had a lot of programs to bring community clergy in, working with the mentally ill. It was just a fun thing to be doing, but they asked John Marshall to step down,” Doebler said. “I was chief of chaplains and had brought in some very skilled people, four of them trained in Washington as community clergy. We had a whole network across the state. John did a lot in the community. He was very open and pretty outspoken – he said the community needs to know what’s going on inside. But I’ll bet you can’t find 10 articles from 1990 until now about Lakeshore. Blanton ruined everything.” In 1985, Doebler went to UT Medical Center to start the chaplaincy program there.
He has enjoyed great success. He served as executive director of the association of Mental Health Clergy for 22 years, raised $5 million to endow UTMC’s chaplaincy program and, along with Nancy, received the 2010 Helen Ross McNabb Spirit Award honoring their mental health work. He still sees patients from Lakeshore, including “one lady I’ve been seeing for 18 years, for nothing – these people have no money. She’ll call at 3, 4 in the morning when she hears voices. She’s being treated by Helen Ross McNabb.” He believes Helen Ross McNabb will benefit from the shutdown of Lakeshore. “They’ll do crisis intervention stuff,” he said. “They’ll get the resources to do an even better job of treatment than they do now.” He pulled out a black bound book published in 1984, titled “The Homeless Mentally Ill.” “You could write this today,” he said “The deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill was a good idea, but the only way it would have worked was to have the resources in the community. You can do better treatment in the community than what would be done in a large institution, but the money has never stayed with the patient.”
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