Psychologist Shined Light On Dark Days Of Child Abuse Mental Health Pioneer Retires After 29 Years

The 8-year-old’s scalp was a pincushion for a parent’s frustration and rage.

Years of beatings with a stick left fresh bruises and cuts on top of more permanent knots and lumps - all visible beneath the blond boy’s buzz cut.

Punishment at the hands of parents was more socially tolerated then, in the early 1970s. What now is called child abuse was still on a par with abuse of animals.

Clay Jorgensen, then a young psychologist counseling the family, saw a tragedy unfolding.

“I was appalled,” he said. “I was appalled because I wasn’t sure what I could do about it.”

Jorgensen never saw them again.

He has spent nearly three decades exorcising the memory of the battered boy, in the process becoming one of Spokane’s leading voices in child-abuse treatment.

He retires today after founding and devot ing 29 years to Spokane Mental Health’s family treatment unit.

Jorgensen watched the center grow from a three-person staff catering to problems of white, upper-class kids to a $4.5 million-a-year operation with counselors in each Spokane elementary school.

Growth at the center mirrored understanding of mental illness. When he arrived in Spokane in 1966, “mental defects” were considered a problem best solved with restraints and radical surgery in institutions.

There were just three licensed psychiatrists in Spokane and psychotropic drugs, such as Thorazine, were novelties.

Childhood illnesses such as autism were believed to be the result of a poor relationship with a “cold mother.”

“You have to put Clay’s perspective in terms of years,” said David Panken, who heads Spokane Mental Health. “He has seen the emergence of modern-day psychiatry.

“He is a wellspring of clinical information that he has readily shared with staff. That kind of experience is difficult to replace.”

The son of a stern Hanford Nuclear Reservation security guard and a nurturing mother, Jorgensen’s parents were determined to send him, the eldest of five, to college. But, disinterested with his classes, Jorgensen was identified as dumb by teachers. “I was at war with authority in high school,” he said.

Empathetic to the outsider, Jorgensen developed a passion for psychology. Like many bright young malcontents, his academic standing rose the longer he studied, eventually resulting in a doctorate from Brigham Young University.

He taught briefly at Eastern Washington University and joined a clinic in Spokane in 1967. There, his focus on child abuse corresponded with rising social and political attention.

The state’s first child abuse law was passed in 1975, just as community mental health centers were funded to deal, in part, with childhood disorders.

Children with behavioral problems referred to Jorgensen were thought to be simply bad kids. But interviews with thousands of families led Jorgensen to see them as victims of cyclical abuse.

Abusive parents were almost all verbally abused themselves, he learned. A child’s problem behavior uncorks the parents’ “legacy of rage and anger,” resulting in punishment out of proportion to the act.

“The bruises and cuts and broken bones are bad enough, but that’s set in a context of massive personal attack and denigration, name-calling, telling kids they’re stupid, no good, they’re not wanted,” said Jorgensen, who wrote a 1991 guide for counseling children after a divorce.

“Those are the wounds that do not heal. The verbal abuse is a virus that continues to infect the child and then has that child infect their children.”

Ed Gaffney, a former counselor with Spokane School District 81, recalls Jorgensen’s advice 25 years ago in dealing with a student on the verge of expulsion.

“Clay said, ‘It’s not just the student who has to change, it’s you who have to change, too,”’ said Gaffney, now head of the district’s special services department.

“He meant that we were only looking at kids’ negative behavior, but not our behavior dealing with the kid. I believe that student got back in school.”

Understanding also led Jorgensen to politically unpopular beliefs. Except for a few “sadists,” Jorgensen believes abusing parents should be rehabilitated, not prosecuted and jailed.

“It makes us feel good to punish them, but it doesn’t help the child,” said Jorgensen.

Even in retirement, Jorgensen plans to maintain a part-time practice, in hopes of preventing another young head being beaten with a stick.

“You remember the ones you reach,” said Jorgensen, adding, “You try to forget the bad ones.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo