ABSTRACT
Alice, pallid and emaciated, trembled as she told the five people in the tiny Creggan parlor about her fear of the soldiers. She was one of a group of six Derry people who had gathered for an intensive three-day workshop on counseling and drug education. Alice had been hospitalized and given electric shock treatments several times. She was escalating her dosage of tranquillizers and sedatives so much that she was ordinarily too drugged to be able to carry out alone even the simplest housework task. On a bright and relatively hot July day she was dressed in a coat, slacks, a sweater, and a headscarf. She remained dressed that way indoors as well as out, and yet, periodically, she would begin trembling with "chills." Alice epitomized the destruction of the ordinary working-class people of Derry. But like them also, she was determined to do something about it and so had come to learn to do crisis counseling. She was convinced that she would learn to help herself and help her neighbors, who were, if less dramatically, suffering from the same syndrome.
