Louis J. and Kathryn West: Probers of the Mind, Dedicated Activists : He Is Director of the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA

“Everybody makes a difference,” Dr. Louis Jolyon West says. “You can fight city hall. You can change the world. It might not seem like much of a change at the time, but you have the power as an individual to do a great deal.”

His appearance matches the message. He has the rugged countenance of a Viking explorer: bearded, with ruddy complexion, he stands 6 feet 4 inches and he weighs 240 pounds.

But West is neither a hotheaded warrior nor a pep-talking sloganeer. He is the chief psychiatrist at UCLA and director of its Neuropsychiatric Institute, where he is the boss of about 2,000 staffers, including 500 psychiatrists.

And in social reform efforts--including the civil rights movement and abolition of the death penalty--West is a dedicated activist who devotes himself to the challenge of making a difference by peaceful means.

Actions and Influence

His actions and influence have been felt in South Africa, where a judge recently ordered police to stop torturing political prisoners. The ruling was hailed as “history making” by South African civil rights activists because it makes the court the active protector of political prisoners. The ruling is considered an outgrowth of West’s testimony in previous cases there.

Psychiatrist West’s nickname, Jolly, seems unlikely to casual acquaintances, for his manner is serious, attentive, concerned. But he lightens up with frequent moments of laughter, and he can convey a measure of humor even in moments of stress.

He is, aptly, a scholar on stress-related matters. Over the years he has won international recognition for his continuing studies of brainwashing, torture, drugs, violence and cults.

As an Air Force physician during the Korean War, West pioneered research into the brainwashing techniques employed against American prisoners by their captors; he found in numerous cases that confessions of “guilt” had been obtained--without overt brutality--by imposing conditions of prolonged sleeplessness and solitary confinement.

He has been a court-appointed expert witness--serving always without fee--in such widely different cases as those of Patricia Hearst, who was kidnaped and later convicted of armed bank robbery, and Jack Ruby, who was convicted of murdering presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

South Africa Trips

West has made several trips to South Africa to assist victims of political persecution in that country. He went there at the request of Amnesty International, the International Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, various South African universities and other groups.

One trip, in 1977, was taken to aid a group of 10 Zulus who had been charged with conspiracy against the security of the state. West testified that any testimony extracted from them was “tainted”--not reliable because of the methods employed in interrogation.

“Even though I believe torture was used against the Zulus,” West told an interviewer recently, “part of my task was to show that it wasn’t necessary to prove that electrodes were applied to the genitals, or splinters under the fingernails, because ‘confessions’ to anything and everything can be obtained in other ways,” especially by applying the same methods used against U.S. prisoners during the Korean War.

In 1983 and again in 1984, West went to South Africa on behalf of Auret Van Heerden, a white political prisoner who opposed apartheid. Van Heerden was tortured by police, and West, who examined him, subsequently testified in court that as a result of the torture, Van Heerden suffered post-traumatic stress disorder--the symptoms included nightmares, phobias, depression. Van Heerden later sued the government and was awarded token damages.

Jolly West’s blend of professional expertise and personal dedication to the goal of “making a difference” is a propellant that keeps him working long hours at UCLA, teaching and lecturing, writing scholarly books and papers, and--when there is time to do so--traveling around the world.

West, 61, has recently been on a Far Eastern tour, lecturing on post-traumatic stress disorders, alcoholism, schizophrenia and depressive illness at medical schools in Japan and China. He is also preparing a paper for the Southern California Psychiatric Society on the psychiatric implications of detention and torture under the apartheid laws of South Africa. He published a book this year on alcoholism and he will shortly begin work on a book on violence.

Traveling with him in Japan and China and delivering separate lectures was his wife, Dr. Kathryn L. West, 62. Like Jolly, she is an activist and she is also a professional prober of the mind.

A staff psychologist at the Veterans Administration in Brentwood, Kathryn West’s lecture topic in Asia dealt with the involvement of families in the treatment of schizophrenia. She is the author of a chapter of a book, “Family Approaches to Major Psychiatric Disorders,” just published by the American Psychiatric Assn.

K, as she is known to friends, combines a warm motherly manner with a love of language (she has written two volumes of poetry) and a stern sense of self-discipline: during a 17-year stretch while the Wests’ three children grew up, K clung firmly to the goal of earning a Ph.D. in psychology.

At the VA, where she specializes in family relations, K gives a singular form of instruction to the closest relatives of severely disturbed mental patients: “We try to teach families how to deal with, talk with, communicate with those patients in order to keep them out of hospitals.” She also teaches family relations to UCLA psychiatric interns and medical students.

When they met at the University of Iowa more than 40 years ago, the Wests came from different worlds. The eldest of three children and the only son of Russian Jews who fled pogroms in their native Kiev and settled in Madison, Wis., Jolly grew up in poverty--but with a sense of power and destiny instilled by his mother. She gave him the middle name “Jolyon” after reading “The Forsyte Saga.”

A Doting Mother

Jolly said: “Describing his own experience, Freud once observed--and I paraphrase--that the only son of a doting mother is very likely to grow up feeling he is destined to accomplish great things. And as far as back as I can remember, I felt that. My mother always told me: ‘You can do anything. You are a genius. You have great gifts. You’ve got to use them. Don’t waste them.’

“And while I was always wasteful of them, I’m sure, the idea took hold that I could do anything I set my mind to do. And this combined with another idea: the more fortunate have to look out for the less fortunate.

“We were, in fact, quite poor. Some of our neighbors didn’t have jobs. Some had no books. The family across the street had no bathtub. It was strictly the wrong side of the tracks. But in our house there was an attitude of ‘Thank God, we’re in America,’ and there was always a willingness to help others.”

Academic subjects came easily. “I was a very fast reader and I remembered what I read.” He was physically strong, but at the University of Wisconsin, where he enrolled at 17 and went out for rowing, he found that physical equipment was not enough.

He said: “Where I really discovered what it meant to make a sustained, goal-directed, painful effort to achieve something, was in sports. You have to train. You have to sacrifice. You have to hurt in order to get really good in a major sport. That was a terrific learning experience for me.”

The following year he enlisted in the Army with a determination “to show Hitler there were Jews who knew how to fight, and to kill.” With a grim chuckle, as if speaking of a dimly remembered acquaintance, West added: “I was a bloodthirsty young fellow.”

Assigned to the infantry and trained to use a machine gun, West “eagerly awaited” combat duty. But instead the Army sent him to the University of Iowa, where he studied medicine. “I didn’t have a great craving to be a physician. But the Army had a real shortage of physicians, and I thought, ‘If that’s what’s needed, that’s what I’ll do.’

“It was only after I got into pre-med that a kind of magical experience took place. I was studying a frog, and all of a sudden it came to me that whatever made the frog’s heart beat was the same thing that made ours. It was the great mystery of life. I was never the same after that.”

Meeting Kathryn

Nor was he ever the same after meeting Kathryn Hopkirk, a trim coed who had grown up in Iowa, the only daughter and youngest of three children in a close-knit Protestant family.

Her parents, K said, “indicated it might be appropriate for me to go to a girls’ school, where I would acquire some of the natural graces that young women were supposed to have. But I didn’t want to learn how to pour tea. I wanted to go into the sciences.”

During her sophomore year as a pre-med student at the University of Iowa, K met incoming freshman Jolly West. He was impressed with, among other attributes, her disciplined sense of priorities. “If K had to study for a test,” he said, “she simply would not go out on a date. I hadn’t met anyone like that before.”

They were married within a year and, K said with a laugh on the recent occasion of their 41st wedding anniversary, “It was clearly one of those hasty, wartime mixed marriages that was doomed to failure.”

Amid their university studies there were part-time jobs to help with expenses. They both worked as lifeguards. K earned additional sums as a waitress and occasionally as an interviewer for pollster George Gallup. Jolly picked up extra money as a teaching assistant in the anatomy department, where he instructed other medical students in the procedures of dissecting cadavers.

In time K changed her major from medicine to clinical psychology, but after three years of graduate studies she became pregnant and dropped out of school. During the next 17 years (“I call it my maternity leave”) she gave priority to the roles of wife and mother, but in 1966 she completed a doctoral thesis in psychosomatic medicine.

“When I finally did it,” she said of her doctorate, “it was with a sense that a burden had been taken off my shoulders. I no longer had to apologize for not having finished my doctoral dissertation.”

K continued her studies with a postdoctoral fellowship in child development at UC Berkeley. After that she worked at UCLA in the field of disturbed adolescents and family therapy. In 1978 she shifted to the VA to specialize in family relations.

Constant Support

One key to her career, K said, has been “constant support from Jolly and the children. There could have been lots of kicking and screaming. But they were surprisingly cheerful about letting me do my own thing.

“There was no pressure on me to neglect my work in order to be a housekeeper. I felt no guilt about not putting a hot meal on the table. Home to me is a place I can go to and lick my wounds of fatigue at the end of the day.”

An extra dividend for K was the experience of “coming back into professional life in my 40s, and finding all kinds of wonderful women role models, many of them younger than I.”

Partly because “I am a supporter of women’s organizations and am very interested in the feminism movement,” K said, and partly because she and Jolly are activists on behalf of liberal social causes, “I am looked upon by some of our more conservative friends as a flaming radical.”

Radical, however, she is not. From the observation post of her ongoing work in family therapy, K said: “In this new and exciting time of our lives, where sexual mores and relationships and the definition of them are far different from when Jolly and I were married 41 years ago, it appears to me that people are still struggling to find answers.

“What’s very clear is that free love has not done away with problems. Open sexuality has not done away with problems. Living together before matrimony has not done away with problems. The need for trust, the need for fidelity, the need for commitment continue to prevail.”

Jolly West’s adventures in medicine began under Army sponsorship and continued in the Air Force. He took psychiatric training at, among other institutions, New York Hospital’s Payne Whitney Clinic.

During the Korean War he was appointed chief of psychiatric services at Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, a major hospital center dealing with many casualties, including U.S. servicemen returning from the Far East.

West was named to a presidential commission to explore the phenomenon of why American airmen, shot down in Korea, confessed falsely to germ warfare.

Confess to Anything

“What we found,” he said, “enabled us to rule out drugs, hypnosis or other mysterious trickery. Just one device was used to confuse, bewilder and torment our men until they were ready to confess to anything. That device was prolonged, chronic loss of sleep.

“If you deprive a person of sleep long enough, he cannot be responsible for his actions. The Air Force accepted our conclusions and never prosecuted any of the men.”

West’s work caught the attention of the University of Oklahoma, and Jolly, then 29, was offered the job of chairman of the department of psychiatry.

“I told them I was immensely flattered,” he said, “but I had a commitment to the Air Force.” The university persisted, however, and Oklahoma Democratic Sen. Mike Monroney made an arrangement with the Air Force whereby West could divide his time between the two jobs.

The posts were 500 miles apart, and for the next two years, West said, “I zoomed back and forth” to deal with both assignments. At the end of his Air Force stint the Wests moved to Oklahoma City to take up life at the university.

There the Wests’ three young children--now ages 36, 33 and 29--were given close-up evidence of their parents’ belief that “everybody makes a difference.”

“Our kids,” K West said, “grew up watching us try to fight racism, to bring sex education into the schools, to reform the penal system and to abolish the death penalty.

“As chief psychiatrist (at the University of Oklahoma), Jolly appointed the first blacks to the medical faculty. We joined in peaceful demonstrations on behalf of civil rights. All this brought hate calls to our home and even bullets through our windows.

“Our kids understood very quickly that outbursts over civil rights were not mere abstractions affecting somebody else, but actual events that were happening to us. It became important to get involved, knowing that even if we didn’t succeed, our effort might make a difference.”

The Wests stayed in Oklahoma 15 years, moving to California in 1969 when UCLA offered Jolly the dual posts of director of its Neuropsychiatric Institute and chairman of its Department of Psychiatry.

Under his leadership the UCLA facility has become a world center of psychiatry with an impressive record of scientific productivity; more than 800 clinical monographs, scholarly papers and textbooks are published annually by the institute’s professional staff.

Major Contributions

Jolly West has made major contributions to research in a number of areas including alcoholism, drug abuse, pain, sleep, dreams, disorders of consciousness, hallucinations, hypnosis. His pioneering studies of brainwashing have continued over the years.

“Brainwashing,” he said recently, “became a term applied to every circumstance in which one person was influenced by others to change his behavior or thinking. And when a word comes to mean too much, it loses what value it might have had. Brainwashing isn’t a term I use myself, except in order to dismiss it and then to focus on what really happened.”

What West found, not only in the Korean War but in a series of studies, including most recently in South Africa, is that “What happens in coerced confinement can be called the three D’s--debility, dread and dependency.

“A prisoner is debilitated by inactivity, by sleep loss or, worse, by physical harm. He is filled with dread by constant threats of pain or death or harm to his family. He is rendered completely dependent upon his captors for information, food, shelter, life.

“Under these conditions there’s a tendency to regress and develop almost a childish relationship to the captors, a total dependency, with the result that--even without actual physical torture--a confession is given,” and the prisoner may come to believe his or her own confession, regardless of its falsity.

As a court-appointed expert witness, working without fee, West examined Jack Ruby following Ruby’s trial and conviction for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, assassin of President John F. Kennedy.

West said: “I found Ruby to be suffering from a major mental illness--apparently precipitated by the stress of the trial and its aftermath--from which he never recovered.” As a result of West’s finding, Ruby’s death sentence was never carried out; Ruby died of cancer in prison.

West was also an expert witness (one of four on a court-appointed panel) who examined Patricia Hearst before her trial for armed bank robbery. He said: “We found her legally sane--and thus able to stand trial--but psychologically damaged as a result of torture by the SLA (Symbionese Liberation Army).” Although convicted and sent to prison, she was released in 1979 after her sentence was commuted by then-President Jimmy Carter.

West’s expertise, and his willingness to be involved, to be an activist for social change by peaceful means, led him to travel twice to Johannesburg in recent years on behalf of Auret Van Heerden.

A white Afrikaner who had been a marathon runner at the University of Witwatersrand, Van Heerden was twice elected president of the National Union of South African Students. He had been non-political by inclination--his father was chief pilot of the Anglo-American Corp., a giant mineral cartel--but he gradually became an advocate of peaceful change to a multiracial democratic society, calling for abolition of apartheid and release of political prisoners.

Suspected by Police

The police suspected that he was a member of the African National Congress, which advocates insurrection. Although Van Heerden did not belong to the ANC, he was arrested by police and detained for 9 1/2 months.

During that period, according to court records, police questioning was accompanied by torture whereby Van Heerden was “deprived of sleep, throttled with a wet towel, forced to stand for long periods, beaten, assaulted, threatened with death and repeatedly given electric shocks to his genitals.”

Following Van Heerden’s release from police custody in 1983, his lawyers arranged for psychological tests, which were administered by Kathryn West, and psychiatric examination, which was done by Jolly West.

When Van Heerden subsequently sued the police, Jolly West returned to Johannesburg to testify at the trial. Van Heerden, he said, was found to be suffering from symptoms of traumatic stress disorder, including “nightmares, phobias, flashbacks, insomnia, depression, sexual impairment, poor concentration.”

Although Van Heerden was awarded only token damages, the winning of the lawsuit brought encouragement to South African civil-rights activists, who regard West’s 1984 testimony as having been a contributing factor in the recent court ruling against police torture.

Psychiatrist West sees plenty of current relevance--not only in South Africa but in Southern California--for his long-term interest in the treatment of captives under duress.

He said: “Today we find large numbers of patients with post-traumatic stress disorders--people who have been traumatized in various ways as torture victims, and who suffer from symptoms that we are only now beginning to understand very well . . . symptoms that frequently keep the patient from seeking psychiatric help because he doesn’t really want to think about those things any more, and he continues to have nightmares or concentration problems or other psycho-physiological complications.”

Such patients are found often in three categories, West said: victims of violence inflicted by others; victims of natural disasters, such as earthquakes and fires; victims of major accidents.

Noting that Southern California is a haven for steadily increasing numbers of immigrants from Asia and Latin America, many of whom were brutalized in their own countries, West said: “There are probably more torture victims in this area than any other place in the world, except in those countries where torture is still sanctioned, officially or unofficially.

“That (immigration) trend, connected to my long-standing theme of work, has brought me to the point where my effort now is to set up at UCLA a center for the study and treatment of patients with post-traumatic stress disorders.

Implications for Others

“A center of this kind will have implications for other people--for victims of rape, where a sizable proportion have symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder; and victims of child abuse, who represent an overlooked and undiagnosed reservoir of post-traumatic stress disorder.”

Interpersonal Violence

In the 1970s an effort was made at UCLA to start “the world’s first and only center for the study of interpersonal violence,” West said. “Not wars and pogroms and revolutions--there were centers doing that--but murder, rape, mayhem, child abuse, battered wives, and the role of alcohol and drugs in causing violence, and the factors that lead people to become violent, and the appropriate care of victims.

“We lined up all kinds of approval for the center, but at the last minute the (California) Legislature prevented us from going ahead, because there had been such an outcry against it--ironically, from many liberal organizations that I belonged to--based on arguments that to study violence was essentially to experiment on underprivileged people, like prisoners or minorities, and also based on arguments that we would be doing brain operations, putting electrodes in their heads, or making guinea pigs out of them.

“This was all utter nonsense, of course. We never planned to do any of those things, and our protocols made clear what we would do. But it was Watergate time. People were not in a trusting mood. And there had been some scandals in the Public Health Service, including the discovery that in a study of syphilis in Florida, some poor blacks had been used as controls and not given medication for the disease.

Frustrating Experience

“So our project to start a center at UCLA was blocked. This was the most frustrating experience of my career. But it didn’t stop us from going on to study violence, and we’ve made a lot of progress in the care and understanding of victims, especially in the fields of child abuse and rape.

“We are making progress in other projects. We know, for example, that witnesses to violence--especially children--are also victims of post-traumatic stress in ways that we had not realized before.

“Some of our younger doctors in the institute are involved in a study of children in three criterion groups: those who witness the murder of a parent, those who witness the suicide of a parent, those who witness the rape of a mother.

“We’re looking at other circumstances in which children are traumatized.” West noted, for example, that following a sniper attack in February, 1984, at the 49th Street Elementary School, which resulted in three dead and 12 wounded, a team of UCLA psychiatrists “went in to examine a number of the survivors: those who were on the playground, those who were inside the school, those who were absent that day, those who go to another school in that neighborhood. One phase of the study even involved counting incidents of nightmares, incidents of other disturbances, such as eating habits.”

In this--and in all of Jolly West’s efforts to make a difference--after all the facts are known, and after all the data have been processed and analyzed, “There comes,” he said, “the ultimate question of how to intervene. How do you help those children, and how do you help other victims? What works in relieving their symptoms? That’s what medicine is all about.”