Soviet Emigre Gets to Offer Therapy With a Soul

There’s no couch in psychiatrist Lia Dobraya’s office at the Salvation Army Adult Rehabilitation Center, just a couple of straight-backed chairs, a metal desk and some file cabinets.

But the doctor who spent the first 27 years of her career in the Soviet Union calls the office her palace, and to the downtrodden who come through the door to try to beat drug or alcohol addiction, it’s a trip toward sobriety.

“The happiest moment, really, of my life in America was when the Salvation Army hired me,” said Dobraya, a therapist at the 126-bed facility for the past year.

Dobraya is one of 11 clinical staffers at the Salvation Army’s largest drug and alcohol rehabilitation center in the country.

“This was something she wanted to do. She came to us,” said the center’s administrator, Maj. Robert Bodine. “One of her first thoughts when she came to the United States was to somehow be involved with the Salvation Army in terms of reflecting her own values in wanting to be involved with people and to help them.”

The Christian-oriented charitable agency wraps the spiritual approach into the educational and clinical aspects of treating--at no charge--alcoholics and drug addicts.

“Dr. Dobraya had a great deal of experience in treating alcoholism and drug addiction in the Soviet Union,” said Dr. Edward Lataille, the center’s director of clinical services. “A lot of that skill is transferable here.

“Her background brings up a natural curiosity for all of us, to try to understand the life she experienced, perhaps the oppression she might have experienced. And she’s able to understand, perhaps, some of the pain and hardships that many of our own (patients) have experienced.”

About 450 people a year go through the center’s six-month residential treatment program, about 40% of whom overcome their addiction, Lataille said.

The patients’ average age is 34, and they cross the social spectrum. The one thing they have in common is that alcohol or drugs have shattered their lives, often to the point where they are living on the street.

“Many of our people have been so devastated by the disease of alcoholism or drug addiction that they’ve lost medical insurances, they’ve lost family and don’t have money or insurance to pay for treatment. So, we’re treating a population that would otherwise not be treated,” Lataille said.

A graduate of Odessa’s Medical Institute, Dobraya went into psychiatry after an internship at a mental hospital exposed her to the sadness of mental disease and chemical dependency.

“I thought, ‘I must help them,’ ” she said.

And though treatment failures often outnumber successes, the success stories make the job worthwhile.

“It’s hard, but it’s a big happiness when you can see you can help these people,” Dobraya said.

Like the United States, Soviet society has severe problems with substance abuse. She described alcoholism as the Soviet Union’s No. 1 health problem and drug abuse, once dismissed as a capitalistic phenomenon, as an emerging social problem.

Because religion was frowned upon in the Soviet Union, doctors were forbidden from introducing it as a therapeutic tool for recovering substance abusers.

Rather, Dobraya said, techniques including hypnosis, group and individual psychotherapy and medications were emphasized in the Soviet Union. But she estimated that more than 80% of the Soviets treated for alcoholism return to drinking.

Now, Dobraya, 51, is free to “appeal to the souls of our clients” as a way to help them toward sobriety.

“The people in the program are happy, and, from a psychiatric point of view, I know it works for them more than any education or medication,” she said.

When the Soviet Union enshrined communism after the October, 1917, revolution, religion became an anathema to the state. Only now under reformist President Mikhail S. Gorbachev is the Soviet Union relaxing suppression of religious activity.

“In the Soviet Union, there was no possibility to even think about a Christian approach or spiritual approach,” she said.

“Even if I could have used that approach, many could not understand it because they grew up without religion. They believed in a false religion. This false religion was created on blood, the blood of millions of people. That is . . . part of the reason which made me emigrate.”

Philosophical differences with the Soviet state and the way its secret police manipulated psychiatry in the past to suppress dissent also motivated her November, 1988, emigration to the United States.

“As soon as I grew up and understood (Communist) politics, I realized almost everything was lies,” she said. “All those things they told us about America also would be lies. We could see by using our own brains.

“And the KGB, you know, used psychiatry to put dissidents away into special mental hospitals. It was a crime, a big shame on our country. It not only bothered me, but you cannot, as you say, sit on the sidelines.”

Born into a Jewish family in the Black Sea city of Odessa, Dobraya endured Soviet anti-Semitism as a child and later the suspicion of the KGB because of her philosophical beliefs and her 1982 conversion to Russian Orthodoxy.

She was allowed to leave the Soviet Union with her husband, Vladimir, a 48-year-old software engineer, when emigration policies were loosened. Their two adult sons, a daughter-in-law and a granddaughter stayed behind, although Dobraya hopes to one day be reunited with them in America.