McFarlane Better but Will Pass Up Panel Discussion

Doctors treating Robert C. McFarlane are “pleased with his progress,” family members said Tuesday, but the former national security adviser has canceled a speaking engagement later this week that had been billed as his return to the public arena.

McFarlane, hospitalized since taking a drug overdose Feb. 9 in what police said was a suicide attempt, “is up and around and maintaining a daily schedule which includes daily exercise,” said a statement from McFarlane’s family released by his office at Georgetown University’s Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Organizers of a lecture series in Richmond, Va., however, were informed over the weekend that McFarlane would not participate as scheduled Saturday in a panel discussion about Iran.

Still in Good Condition

“They implied the doctors would prefer he not go out,” said Ralph Krueger, president of the Richmond Forum, which is sponsoring the discussion.

McFarlane, a key figure in the Administration’s arms sales to Iran even after he left the White House late in 1985, continued to be listed in “good” condition Tuesday at Bethesda Naval Medical Center. Hospital and family spokesmen said there were no indications when he would be released.

Although many people who attempt suicide are treated in hospital emergency rooms and not admitted as inpatients, psychiatrists said Tuesday that it also was not unusual for such a person to remain in the hospital as long as four to six weeks.

Treatment Complication

McFarlane’s treatment is complicated by the knowledge that, whenever he resumes public life, he will be thrust back into the middle of a national furor over the Iran- contra arms scandal, said Washington psychiatrist Dr. John J. McGrath, a member of the board of trustees of the American Psychiatric Assn.

“I’m sure the doctors treating him are very much aware that, even if it’s cooled down a bit, he’s still going to be returning to a frying pan,” McGrath said.

The length of hospital treatment also would depend upon the depth of the depression that prompted a suicide attempt, said Dr. Herbert Modlin, senior psychiatrist at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kan. “With someone like this who has a life history of being a fairly solid person, for him to fall apart has to be taken as something quite serious,” Modlin said.