What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [45]
In 1991, at seventy-two, Robby decided to start his own therapy practice in Warrenton. But because his Ph.D. was in life-span psychology, he had no license to practice as either a psychologist or a clinical psychologist in the state of Virginia. He feared that unless he had state licensing his patients would not qualify for medical insurance reimbursements, and it would be tough to make a go of it. So Robby went to the state capital in Richmond and took the state exam for psychologists. “By mistake, the monitor gave me the exam in clinical psychology, just as she gave to the hundred other people in the hall,” he said. Robby passed anyway, but he was notified that he was ineligible for licensing because he did not have a degree in clinical psychology. Though he returned and passed the correct exam and an oral exam on medications, state rules continued to bedevil his licensing. Still, he practiced and all went well, “That is, until I decided to apply for payment from Medicare. Back it comes, rejected because I’m not a licensed clinical psychologist. I blew my top,” he said.
In 1996, after he hired a lawyer who filed an appeal with the state, Robby—at age seventy-six—was called before the state examining board where his case was presented. When it was done, they asked Robby and his lawyer to leave the room. “Then after ten minutes of deliberation, they call me back in, and the head of the committee says, ‘Dr. Iadeluca, you are now a clinical psychologist.’ I had tears in my eyes. In that instant, they were telling me what I’d known all along. Moreover, they said I was a clinical psychologist retroactively, to 1992.”
As an educational pilgrim, Robby was still not done with his progress. Next, he tackled psychopharmacology because it so intertwined with the treatment of addiction. Between 1995 and 1999, he took seventeen workshops, covering such subjects as psychoactive medications, gene expression, neurotransmitters, mood disorders, drug interactions, and the biological bases of mental symptoms. He also passed lengthy examinations after each workshop and then was awarded a diplomate from the International College of Prescribing Psychologists. In his quest to achieve surpassing expertise, Robby attended more than one thousand twelve-step meetings. Most were Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, but they also included Narcotics Anonymous, Cocaine Anonymous, Nicotine Anonymous, and Overeaters Anonymous. To add to his understanding of addicts, he also spent weekends riding around in a squad car overnight with Prince William, Virginia, police so that he could observe the behavior of people from their time of arrest for driving while under the influence, through booking at a station house to blood tests at the hospital. “Then I would go see these people who were arrested the next morning in jail,” he said. “Very often, they wouldn’t remember what they had done the night before. So I got a tremendous education in addiction.”
Knowledge, of course, has not protected Robby from heartache. In speaking with me, Robby resisted disclosing painful memories detailing the dissolution of his twenty-three-year marriage to Bijou, who died many years ago, or the reasons why his decade-long marriage to Betsy and his fifteen-year union with Lois ended. Even in vague outline, the sense of loss and disappointment was clear, but so was his wish not to inflict unnecessary pain by revealing private information or rehash what had happened. And that was instructive,