NOTE: On January 31 friends and family of Leonard Roy Frank held a memorial service mourning his death and celebrating his life at the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco. To listen to an audio recording of the service, click here (a video shot and produced by Ellison Horne will be posted soon.) Following is the eulogy that I presented.
Shortly before he turned thirty, Leonard Roy Frank read Gandhi An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth. That book changed his life. Along with his own religious experiences and books by other authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William James, and Arnold Toynbee, it prompted him to more fully reject the materialism of his youth. His new worldview did not emerge out of thin air. A letter he wrote in the mid-1950s included a vehement attack on “commercialism.” But his spiritual faith did dramatically deepen. In many respects, he was reborn, a new man. For more than fifty years, he followed that path with remarkable diligence.
Though Leonard respected approaches such as Buddhism and indigenous spirituality, his faith was monotheism, and not just some amorphous theism. His God was a personal God who shared with humanity many of the same characteristics that make humans distinct -- such as consciousness, intelligence, will power. His God spoke to Leonard through his dreams and during prayer. He experienced an intimate partnership with his God, a Being who sustained him in his life as an urban hermit. Leonard was rarely lonely. His God was almost always by his side.
Leonard believed God needs humanity as much as humanity needs God. His God united the many faiths that preceded his Hebrew faith and provides the integrating power that energizes and structures life. Today many astrophysicists speak in similar terms about the force behind the universe, and many students of the mind speak in similar terms about the unconscious mind, which they say is rooted in a collective unconscious. With Emerson, Leonard believed that if individuals go down deep within and discover their true Self, they encounter the Ground of All Being and feel interwoven with all life.
The night I found his body following what the medical examiner said was probably an “event,” the shades were drawn, the lights were on, the television was off, and there was a notebook laying on his bed, suggesting that he had been sitting up in bed scribbling notes in the middle of the night as he often did. Those notes concerned Jesus. On his computer screen was the fourteenth Psalm. Next to his computer keyboard were three books: The Names of God, God in the Dock, and his old copy of the Holy Bible, whose cover was held together with tape. The condition of that Bible suggests that he studied it more than any other book. When asked, he once recited the Lord’s Prayer word for word. He frequently watched evangelists on television to learn from them. His relationship with God was the primary, deepest, most important part of his life.
As a student of Jung and Campbell, Leonard appreciated the power of symbols and myths and generally did not interpret the Bible literally as do fundamentalists. But he did believe some parts of the Bible were literally true, and he did take some of its directives literally, such as the prescription to avoid shaving. When they locked him up in 1962, the psychiatrists forcibly shaved his beard, which infuriated him. Another source of conflict with Psychiatry was his Gandhi-inspired vegetarianism, which the psychiatrists considered another sign of mental illness.
Their massive doses of insulin coma and electroshock treatments wiped out much of his memory. But he never submitted to their authority. He never said what they wanted to hear. He never sold out. I suspect the psychiatrists just gave up. Upon release, he returned to his former lifestyle, let his beard grow, practised vegetarianism, soon became a vegan, promoted veganism passionately, and with the benefit of an inheritance that enabled him to live simply, pursued his studies and spiritual discipline.
Once Leonard ate chicken by mistake when the waiter gave him a dish with what appeared to be tofu. At first he was angry, but he soon forgave himself, saying “There was no intention.” Throughout his life, seeking to optimize his health and energy level, he constantly experimented with his diet. In recent years, he emphasized chewing slowly, very, very slowly. He seemed to finally figure out a diet that worked for him, as he got sick much less frequently in recent years and had consistently high energy for months prior to his death.
Another major impact on Leonard was Arnold Toynbee, the world historian and philosopher who was highly regarded in the 1940s and 1950s but then fell out of favor due to his spiritual outlook. Toynbee concluded that societies evolve to higher levels by responding successfully to challenges of extreme difficulty, under the leadership of creative minorities who help reorient their entire society. The greater the challenge, the better, for it “rouses [people] to make a hitherto unprecedented effort…. We have not yet encountered an example of [an excessive challenge],” he wrote. A society’s spiritual health, according to Toynbee, was the most important factor in determining whether it would rise or fall.
That perspective was a major pillar in Leonard’s life. He monitored the stock market closely every day, trying to divine prospects for the future. He followed every major crisis closely, such as the Fukishima nuclear meltdown and the Ukraine conflict. He almost always had the network news on TV while he worked at his computer, proving that some people can multi-task effectively. He focused on looming crises because he anticipated that one would eventually escalate into a near-catastrophe that would wake people up just in time to prevent a total catastrophe, thereby paving the way for both personal and social transformation. When pressed he would acknowledge the value of incremental reforms, but his tendency was to focus like a laser beam on how those gains fell short.
The transformation he envisioned was heaven on earth. His vision included a widespread return to the land, extensive organic farming, and complete peace. Many great writers and leaders like Jesus have been Utopians. But in 1962, being a Utopian could get you locked up and labelled paranoid schizophrenic. After all, paranoids are also supposed to be grandiose, and Leonard certainly had grand dreams -- for all of us. He wanted a New Revolution and he wanted all of us, including himself, to make major contributions. Promoting that vision was his greatest passion. It motivated him to do his work with an incredible degree of devotion and discipline. That passion was the glue that held together our relationship.
Leonard was no more crazy than many prominent Utopians who populate human history. Even those who take his dreams less literally than he did would do well to derive meaning from them -- as Karl Jung and Joseph Campbell, two of his heroes, did with dreams, myths, and symbols.
Needless to say, after his incarceration, Leonard developed a keen interest in Psychiatry and soon found a lifelong, close ally in Thomas Szasz, whose 1961 book, The Myth of Mental Illness, received widespread attention. Szasz argued that if and when biological factors cause emotional and psychological difficulties, those problems should be diagnosed as a physical illness, not a mental one. Otherwise, we can use plain English, not medical jargon, to talk about personal problems. Szasz and Leonard therefore rejected the very notion of “mental illness,” and opposed giving psychiatrists the power to treat people against their will.
Leonard had another problem with the medical model: it is materialistic. It reduces human beings to objects, helpless victims of their biology. His spiritual faith deepened his opposition to biological psychiatry.
During the formation of the Network Against Psychiatric Assault, or NAPA, Leonard proposed a focus on three simple demands: No More Forced Drugging; No More Forced Psychosurgery; No More Forced Shock. The other co-founders accepted that proposal and NAPA’s first brochure featured a quote from C.S. Lewis:
Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive… Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience…. You start being “kind” to people before you have considered their rights, and then force upon them supposed kindnesses which they in fact had a right to refuse, and finally kindnesses which no one but you will recognize as kindnesses and which the recipient will feel as abominable cruelties.
As he rebuilt his memory and worked steadily to sharpen and maintain his intellectual skills that had been damaged by those shock treatments, that opposition to forced treatment motivated Leonard the rest of his life and led him to become the “bedrock” of the psychiatric survivors movement, as Sally Zinman, a fellow activist described him.
His later research further undermined Psychiatric authority. Psychiatry’s Achilles Heel is the placebo effect. When people are given a “sugar pill” or its equivalent in controlled double-blind studies, as many or almost as many recipients appear to benefit after receiving the placebo as do those who receive the real treatment -- especially when studied months or years later. Properly designed studies have also found that people who are labelled psychotic do better in drug-free programs with intensive psychosocial support that in traditional hospitals. So Leonard and his colleagues concluded that it is not accurate to simply generalize that most psychiatric treatments are “safe and effective.” Making generalizations about their value based on personal anecdotes is foolhardy. Granted, Leonard didn’t like psychiatric drugs. He didn’t even like Aspirin. But his bottom line was that individuals should make their own decisions. And he did take painkillers once.
On January 17, two days after he died, The New York Times published a provocative op-ed titled “Redefining Mental Illness.” That piece reported that the Director of the National Institute of Mental Health had recently
announced that psychiatric science had failed to find unique biological mechanisms associated with specific diagnoses…. Diagnoses were neither particularly useful nor accurate for understanding the brain, and would no longer be used to guide research…. It jettisoned a decades-long tradition of diagnosis-driven research…. Social experience plays a significant role in who becomes mentally ill…. Illness thus requires social interventions, not just pharmacological ones.
Though that piece continues to talk about “mental illness,” that development is a positive step, a move away from the medical model toward a holistic perspective. Psychiatry’s claim to authority is based on its alleged ability to diagnose. If psychiatrists can’t diagnose, it calls into question the very foundation of their authority and their claim to be able to explain and predict human behavior, which in fact will forever remain a mystery. We are not robots.
That shift in thinking at the National Institute of Mental Health, along with society’s growing interest in veganism, organic food, spirituality, and the philosophy of nonviolence, suggest that the psychiatrists who labelled Leonard’s beliefs a sign of mental illness were on the wrong side of history.
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Leonard could breathe fire and brimstone and most of our conversations were intense intellectual discourse. When we’d go hiking with one friend or another, they rarely stopped talking, rather than silently communing with Mother Nature as I preferred. And I remember how I was amazed when, after the international Alternatives to Psychiatry conference in Cuernavaca, we were at a party doing the kind of things people do at parties and he kept preaching non-stop!
Being brutalized probably made Leonard more guarded than he was before he was locked up. It took him many years to get over his fear of being incarcerated again for being too honest. In general he was a private person. But at times he expressed remarkable spontaneous tenderness, like when he encountered a pet rabbit in Golden Gate Park, or gave Freddi Fredrickson what she said was a very good back rub in a self-help personal-growth group. And we often had fun together, like playing golf at a Morro Bay public course. Or when he smuggled in recording equipment for a friend to help him surreptitiously record a Dylan concert. Or when we laughed and ran away from the TV cameras after he and two other NAPA members were rescued from near death by the Fire Department on the cliffs at Land’s End. Or watching the Warriors win the NBA Championship from the rafters of the Cow Palace (he was thrilled by this year’s team). And the many hours we spent watching sporting events together in his apartment.
With regard to personal matters, Leonard was reserved, but if asked, he would express his feelings honestly. Once I asked him, “In what way do you want to be a better person?” and he gave me a long list of eight or more characteristics that he would like to work on. None of the items alone were unusual. What surprised me was how long the list was and that he had rarely discussed those issues with me.
When I wrote publicly about how I was frustrated by the nature of most conversations in our modernized world, he was the only reader to ask me if my comments applied to my relationship with him. When I elaborated, he asked me to point out him to him any future instances of the pattern I reported.
In the last year or so, Leonard seemed to mellow some. Twice he even had nice things to say about President Obama! A week before he died he suggested that we see the film Selma. Later I learned that the last sixteen of his daily posts to Twitter at #FrankAphorisms were quotes from Dr King. After the movie, Leonard and I had tea and engaged in a warm conversation about our shared belief in nonviolence as a philosophy, a way of life, not merely a strategy or tactic. It was the best conversation we’d had in some time and was our last time together.
The next day we discussed the film again on the phone and he told me he was coming down with a cold. Two days later, the cold was worse. On Wednesday night, he called me during halftime of the Warriors’ basketball game and left a message asking me to call him. He probably wanted to discuss the game. But I didn’t get the message until the next morning and he never replied to my messages that day, so I gained access to his apartment that night and found his body.
Leonard was my Rock of Gibraltar. We were intimately interwoven. Sherri Hirsch once said, “Leonard is the Old Testament. Wade is the New Testament.” When I wrote about that and he read it, he approved. He was a very good listener and very astute about the character of others. He believed in me more than I believed in myself and encouraged me to pursue my dreams. When I expressed doubts about my abilities, he praised them. When I wavered, he urged me to press on.
I am a different person because of Leonard. I’ll be different because he’s gone. I suspect the same is true with many others. Who knows? Maybe someday the walls between us will crumble and we will join in a popular movement to transform our society into a compassionate community. Leonard wants us to do nothing less.
