Dr. Bob's Drugless Guide to Mental Health

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That they might have the answer to his drinking problem never entered his head, but he thought it could do him no harm to study their philosophy. For the next two and one half years he attended their meetings. And got drunk regularly! Then one Saturday afternoon, Henrietta called Anne. Could they come over to meet a friend of hers who might help Bob. Alcoholics Anonymous. Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers: a Biography, with Recollections of Early A.A. in the Midwest. New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 1980. N.B.: No identification of individual author(s) or editor(s) of the text is made. ISBN 0-916856-07-0 In 1935 Dr. Bob met Bill Wilson, a New York businessman and entrepreneur who was struggling with his own alcoholism. The two immediately became close friends, with Bill showing Dr. Bob how he, with spiritual help, was finally able to recover from the effects of alcoholism. Now he held a Dartmouth diploma, but the desire to become a medical doctor was still with him. His mother, who had never approved of this career for her son, hadn’t altered her views. For the next two years he worked for a large scale company; then he went to Montreal where he labored at selling railway supplies, and heavy hardware. He left Montreal and went to Filene’s store in Boston. While Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith thoroughly appreciated the spirit of personal gratitude that usually prompted such superlatives, he never took them seriously as applicable to himself. He rose up to tell with all humility the simple story of an alcoholic’s return to sobriety. Dr. Bob seldom called upon his vast experience with others. He simply repeated in different ways the story of one man’s great return. And that was his own.

Bill, Bob, and many early A.A.’s read Professor William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (cited by name in A.A.’s Big Book) and Dr. Carl Gustav Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Jung was later called a “founder” of A.A. as was William James. Starting his YouTube channel on October 1, 2020, with the description Hi! I'm Dr. Bob! I love animation and I love SCP! Join me as we delve into the SCP Foundation's archives in these animations! Dr. Bob is one of the most popular animated based SCP youtubers due to his impressively creative animations and the soft and engaging narration of his voice actor. Moreover, one could not, as Dr. Bob said, claim he had read an immense amount of Oxford Group literature, without having read many Shoemaker books. Shoemaker was the most prolific Oxford Group writer, was in touch with Oxford Group people in Akron, and was a close friend of Bill Wilson’s. Therefore, though the following were the Shoemaker books the author found in possession of Dr. Bob’s family, there must have been many others: Children of the Second Birth, Confident Faith, If I Be Lifted Up, The Conversion of the Church, Twice-Born Ministers, and One Boy’s Influence. There were also popular Shoemaker pamphlets, titled Three Levels of Life and What If I Had but One Sermon to Preach? Through these years Dr. Bob was an active member of the City Hospital Staff and often he had occasion to go to St. Thomas Hospital, where in 1934 he became a member of the Courtesy Staff and in 1943 a member of the Active Staff. It was during one of these visits to St. Thomas, in 1928, that in the course of his duties, he met Sister Mary Ignatia, whose work with alcoholics was to become a legend. It then happened that Dr. Bob and Anne were thrown in with a crowd of people who attracted Dr. Bob because of their poise, health and happiness. These people spoke of their problems without embarrassment, a thing he could never do. They all seemed very much at ease. Above all, they seemed happy. They were members of the Oxford Group. Self-conscious, ill at ease most of the time, his health nearing the breaking point, Dr. Bob was thoroughly miserable. He sensed that these newfound friends had something that he did not have. He felt that he could profit from them.All through this period he was drinking as much as purse allowed, still without getting into any serious trouble. But he wasn’t making any headway either. He still wanted to be a doctor. It was time he was about it. He quit his job at the store and that Fall entered the University of Michigan as a pre-medical student. Again he was free of all restraint. Earnestly, he got down to the serious business of drinking as much as he could and still make it to class in the morning. His famous capacity for beer followed him to the Michigan campus. He was elected to member- ship in the drinking fraternity. Once again he displayed the wonders of his “patent throat” before his gaping brothers. Early A.A. was not about “relationships anonymous.” Whether they read the Bible, the Ten Commandments, or the Four Absolutes, AAs were given much instruction on how to behave in accordance with God’s will. This is true today in only a very limited This aspect of Dr. Bob’s reading was considered so important that his Bible was donated to the King School Group (A.A. Number One), and it is taken to the podium at the beginning of each meeting, to this very day a ceremony the author personally witnessed in the company of Dr. Bob’s daughter Sue. In January 1933, Bob Smith attended a lecture by Frank Buchman, the founder of the Oxford Group. For the next two years Smith attended local meetings of the group in an effort to solve his alcoholism, but recovery eluded him until he met Bill Wilson on May 12, 1935. Wilson was an alcoholic who had learned how to stay sober, thus far only for some limited amounts of time, through the Oxford Group in New York, and was close to discovering long-term sobriety by helping other alcoholics. Wilson was in Akron on business that had proven unsuccessful and he was in fear of relapsing. Recognizing the danger, he made inquiries about any local alcoholics he could talk to and was referred to Smith by Henrietta Seiberling, one of the leaders of the Akron Oxford Group. After talking to Wilson, Smith stopped drinking and invited Wilson to stay at his home. He relapsed almost a month later while attending a professional convention in Atlantic City. Returning to Akron on June 9, he was given a few drinks by Wilson to avoid delirium tremens. He drank one beer the next morning to settle his nerves so he could perform an operation, which proved to be the last alcoholic drink he would ever have. The date, June 10, 1935, is celebrated as the anniversary of the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous.

We will cover our bibliographies in a moment. But here there should be a list of some particularly popular spiritual books early AAs read and which were read by Dr. Bob as well: James Allen’s As A Man Thinketh; Glenn Clark’s Fishers of Men, Two or Three Gathered Together, How to Find Health Through Prayer, and Touchdowns for the During the next few years, he developed two distinct phobias. One was the fear of not sleeping and the other was the fear of running out of liquor. So began the squirrel-cage existence. Staying sober to earn enough money to get drunk, getting drunk to go to sleep, using sedatives to quiet the jitters, staying sober, earning money, getting drunk, smuggling home a bottle, hiding the bottle from Anne who became an expert at detecting hiding places. Smith was born in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, where he was raised, to Susan A. (Holbrook) and Walter Perrin Smith. [1] His parents took him to religious services four times a week, and in response he determined he would never attend religious services when he grew up. He graduated from St Johnsbury Academy in 1898, having met his future wife Anne Robinson Ripley at a dance there. [2] Education, marriage, work, and alcoholism [ edit ] If early AAs wanted to know God’s instructions on faith, believing, prayer, study of His Word, forgiveness, healing, deliverance, love, restitution, service, resentment, fear, selfishness, dishonesty, their literature was replete with road maps to pertinent sections of the Bible and teachings about these things. Like his fellow SCP animator Detective Void, Dr. Bob is theorized to be a human of possible anomalous origins due to interacting with many other SCPs. Some of these would normally be fatal for any other human being but the doctor merely brushes them off.Many of the core ideas that AAs adopted were ideas that were covered in depth by many different books and materials they read.

Slowly at first, then with sudden clarity, Dr. Bob began to understand. Bill had been able to control his drinking problem by the very means that Dr. Bob himself had been trying to use—but there was a difference. The spiritual approach was as useless as any other if you soaked it up like a sponge and kept it all to yourself. True, Bill had been preaching his message at any drunk who would listen; he had been unsuccessful until now, but the important thing was that by giving his knowledge away, he, himself, was sober! There was one more short binge for Dr. Bob after that talk. On June 10, 1935, he took his last drink remaining sober until his death on November 15, 1950. Anne and the children now lived in a shambles of broken promises, given in all sincerity. Unable to see her friends, Anne existed on the bare necessities. About all she had left was her faith that her prayers for her husband would somehow be answered.

These are mentioned in A.A. histories. And they were mentioned in pamphlets and bulletins put out by A.A. offices and groups. They were also mentioned by many of the surviving families and pioneers the author interviewed.

AAs were told by Sam Shoemaker, by the Oxford Group, and by their own literature that they needed to find God and find Him now! Sam Shoemaker wrote on this topic a great deal. So did Leslie D. Weatherhead in books that Bill Wilson owned or may have owned. So did the other writers. His first discovery in his search for the facts of life on the campus was that joining the boys for a brew seemed to make up the greater part of after-class recreation. From Dr. Bob’s point of view it was the major extra-curricular activity. It had long been evident that whatever Rob did, he did well. He became a leader in the sport. He drank for the sheer fun of it and suffered little or no ill- effects. His years at Dartmouth were spent doing exactly what he wanted to do with little thought of the wishes or feelings of others—a state of mind which became more and more pre- dominant as the years passed. Rob graduated in 1902 …“summa cum laude” in the eyes of the drinking fraternity. The dean had a somewhat lower estimate. Of the Oxford Group books and the Bible] . . . I had done an immense amount of reading they had recommended. I had refreshed my memory of the Good Book, and I had had excellent training in that as a youngster (The Co-Founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 11-12).The Confessions of St. Augustine, The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis, and The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence were all owned by Bob and were frequently quoted by the writers whose books Bob read. For the next two and a half years [After January, 1933], Bob attended Oxford Group meetings regularly and gave much time and study to its philosophy. . . . He read the Scriptures, studied the lives of the saints, and did what he could to soak up the spiritual and religious philosophies of the ages (p. 56).