Jeanne Sonville, a psychiatric nurse and counsel. or, is a founder and former Director of the Free Medical Clinic of Greater Cleveland. She is presently the Clinic Co-ordinator and Director of the Free Clinic's Drug Abuse and Mental Health Program. This is the first of a 3-part conversation with Jeanne.

Jeannie, how would you describe yourself?

I'm a 52-year-old woman, widowed 18 years, have a 29-year-old son, 2 granddaughters, and several foster children. I was born of middle class parents and reared with an advantage most people don't have I was born of parents who loved one another. Their love for me was not a smothering love. I was instilled with pride for a job well-done.

My parents reasoned that even if I and my brother married someday, we should be prepared if something happened to our spouses.

We were

taught role reversal. My brother had to learn how to cook. I had to help my dad work on the car. It was a very deliberate teaching situation, and it's certainly been a life-saver for me.

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My parents are still living and fairly well. I feel that I'm basically a very secure person, and I got to be, that way because of the environment in which I was fortunate enough to be reared parents who respected us as individuals, and encouraged us to become independent and independent thinkers, who worked from a praise base, rather than from a fault-finding base.

My husband also encouraged me to maintain my own individuality, so that most of my life has been in a growth situation where I have been encouraged to and felt free to go after those things that I wanted to go after. And I'm still doing it. I don't know where I'm going next who knows? Something will come up. I've been toying with the idea of maybe going back to school and getting my Ph.D., and then I think, at the age of 52, why do I need any more letters after my name?

You're an R.N. A psychiatric nurse.. Where did you go to school?

I went to Huron Road Hospital Training School for Nurses for my nursing, did a psychiatric internship at what is now Cleveland Metropolitan General Hospital, and did post-graduate work at Western.

You decided at an early age to go to nursing school, didn't you?

Yes, very early. This was the one time I didn't have my parents' support. It was a hard choice to make to go ahead without either their financial support or their stamp of approval. I was used to them approving of almost everything I wanted to do. They had saved hard, even during the depression years, to keep that educational fund going for my brother and myself. My father just wanted us to go to college because it was one of those opportunities that he didn't have.

Wasn't nursing school considered the same as going to college?

Not in my day. When I went through nurse's training during World War II, nurses were still lackeys well, they still are, but even more so then. The nurse's role was to say, "Yes, Ma'am, Yes, Sir". We scrubbed floors on our hands and knees. We truly were the bedpan pushers and the bedpan washers. And nursing was very one-sided. It was all medically-oriented -the old school of nursing.

You say that nurses still are lackeys?

Yes. Doctors, for the most part, still just order nurses around. They're not even open to suggestions. Most physicians today see nurses as the person there to carry out their orders without question.

At what point did you decide that you wanted to do something different with your nursing?

Page 8/ What She Wants/November, 1978***

Interview with Jeanne Sonville

I'm not sure that ever became a conscious decision. Those things just sort of evolved for me. My first love had been general duty nursing on the floors. I was Head Nurse for quite some time and I was in trouble a lot because I probably was one of the first nurses to argue with doctors. Some doctors were receptive and said, "Hey, she's got something to say." Then one of the doctors asked me if I would come and work with him. He needed another doctor in his office, and felt that I was as good as any doctor.

Who was that?

Eddie Marshall. Dr. Marshall. He practiced a whole different kind of medicine. My job in his office was to take the patient's history and give him a provisional diagnosis. This was at a time when nurses were never allowed to tell a patient what their temperature was, to tell a patient what their blood

Ungvary, who was head of the Subversive Squad, standing behind a tree across the street from my house every day. It was funny, but yet it wasn't. Skipper was in the third grade and getting all kinds of flak about "his mother the Communist," and Bud's job was in jeopardy because he was doing some top-secret work for the government, and he was being called on the carpet because his wife was a "subversive". I don't think I've ever been a **subversive". I had my own opinion, and I disagreed with what the government was doing. I thought it was shitty. I've never been a member of anything except our supposedly democratic society, and all of a sudden I'm being very democratic, and they're trying to shut me up. But I stuck with it.

What other kinds of things did you get involved with?

"I don't think I've ever been a 'subversive'. I had my own opinion, and I disagreed with what the government was doing.".

pressure was, to give a patient any kind of information. Here was a doctor who was asking me to sit down with every patient after he got done with them to explain what he found, what the laboratory tests were, what that meant, what any pills were that they were put on, why they were put on them, and what the medication was supposed to do, what the patient was supposed to expect, and to call me "if you have any questions". My job was to really teach them something about their own anatomy and physiology, which we've certainly tried to carry over, here at the Free Clinic. It was a whole different approach than anybody else was using. He felt that the general public was intelligent, and if you gave them the information, they'd use it, and they'd use it to their advantage to help take care of themselves. He wasn't hung up with being A Doctor.

How long did you work in that situation?

I worked in his office for 5 years, and then for 10 years I headed up the Marshall Research Foundation. Dr. Marshall had done some innovative things in medicine, and the royalties from that went into Huron Road Hospital to what was the Marshall Research Foundation, as opposed to taking the royalties himself. For the most part it was exciting work. There were times when I wished that there had been more patient contact, but we wrote several articles for medical journals on our findings. It was a good experience for me. Then I went into Public Health.

How old were you at that time?

I was 41. Most of the time I was doing the research I was going to school on and off, and it just happened that just about all of my courses were psychology, psychiatry-oriented, because I'd always been into that. I wasn't intending really to go anyplace much with it, but it just related to a lot of the other activities I was in.

What were some of those activities?

I originally was involved with something called Voice of Women, which eventually joined up with Women Speak Out for Peace and Justice. I was with a group of the first people that ever demonstrated against nuclear testing, which put me into some chemistry and physics classes that were over my head. But I got enough out of it so that I certainly knew that I was anti-nuclear testing. I was then part of, and still am, Clergy and Laymen Concerned, and was very active in the late '50's and early '60's with that. I came out against Vietnam before it was popular and was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee. I don't know if I'd have been able to sustain that if I didn't have the support of my husband. I mean, there was Sergeant

I got involved in the "Coffeehouse Movement", integration, Black issues, and was readily accepted in the Black community. At that time I lived in East Cleveland. East Cleveland was starting to have Blacks move in, so I helped to form a neighborhood group for peaceful integration. Out of that came a coffeehouse called The Well. When we planned The Well, it was with the thought that it would be a storefront where Blacks and Whites would be seen sitting down over a cup of coffee. There was an open-door policy. We were inundated with teenagers who were unhappy with what the Establishment was doing. This was in '65. The teenagers would come from Parma, Independence, Ashtabula. In many cases they were interracial couples and weren't accepted anyplace that I know of in this county. There wasn't any room for the adults except those of us who had started it. We'd volunteer once a week to serve coffee and to be responsible for the place.

And here came the kids in their`sandals and their serapes carrying their guitars, who were really the first "hippies". They were not only rejecting what was happening in society, but, because they were