Psychiatrists are barred from diagnosing those they have not interviewed, but surely Sutherland's selection of clips is meant to suggest quite serious and protracted anguish in both husband and wife. The Buschkoetters endure stress, but to say this much, or rather this little, is to reveal the inadequacy of the word. They face repeated assaults on their security, and they face them with limited social support. They have faith in abundance, but despite the views we are given of holiday ceremonies, we have little sense of whether the Church ever comes to their aid. The occasional gracious creditor notwithstanding, the Buschkoetters seem to live in a socially fragmented rural county.
Farmers sink or swim on their own.
What helps most, it seems, are federal programs, loans and food stamps and Pell grants. Juanita's classes at the community college are perhaps the most important source of hope. Along with psychotherapy and faith, we must include government programs among the antidepressants that work for Darrel and Juanita. Supervising the care of a gravely disturbed man in the 1940s, the preeminent psychiatrist of the mid-century, Harry Stack Sullivan, would ask the treating resident whether the patient had served on a destroyer or a destroyer escort in the navy, since the tensions on the two sorts of vessel are so different. Erik Erikson and Erich Fromm and the Menningers in their different ways demanded that psychoanalysts take cultural factors into account in assessing the proper approach to patients.