Twenty-six years ago, Domeena C. Renshaw was a young general practitioner treating Zulus at a mission hospital near Durban, South Africa. She delivered babies, doctored snakebite and tuberculosis cases, treated people for parasites and pellagra.
Today, Renshaw is a psychiatrist internationally known for her work in sexual dysfunction. She lives in Lombard, teaches at Stritch School of Medicine of Loyola University in Maywood and counsels patients with problems ranging from impotence to childhood sex abuse. She is the founder and driving force behind the Loyola Sexual Dysfunction Clinic, now in its 19th year.
And she is still a missionary, as she sees it: ”I started in the mission hospital because it was where I perceived the need. To me, this is just a different mission field (sexuality) with a desperate shortage of physicians in U.S. medicine. It`s an area of such pain that people don`t know where to turn.”
To steer the sufferers to help, Renshaw has worked the media like a trouper. On radio and national television shows such as ”Donahue” and
”Geraldo,” on local news shows and in print, she has hit the message again and again: ”Sexual problems are as treatable as other physical, emotional and behavioral problems.” Last spring a New York PBS crew filmed her for a segment of a 13-part series on human behavior, scheduled to air next year. Ann Landers has printed her letters-for her answers, not her questions. And to reach another group in need of sex education, her medical colleagues, she has written several books and more than 300 articles for medical journals on three continents. She has also made teaching videotapes and audiocassettes, created scientific exhibits for numerous professional meetings and lectured widely to physicians in this country and abroad.
But the heart of her work is at Loyola, centered in an office the size of a small closet. Her titles of professor and assistant chairman of the department of psychiatry obviously deliver no clout in terms of space allocation.
”We have a tremendous space problem,” she says, waving an arm toward the clutter of books, papers and cabinets crammed into the tiny room. ”Our patient load has grown so much over the years.”
She speaks rapidly in the British-accented English of her native South Africa. Short and quick, she looks younger than her 62 years. On this late summer morning, she settles back in her desk chair with a mildly impatient air to relate a story she has told many times before.
”The sexual dysfunction clinic started by pure geographic accident. In the early `70s, the psychiatry department here was sandwiched between gynecology on one side and urology on the other, and we began to get the referrals of the inorgasmic ladies from the one side and the impotent men and the premature ejaculators from the other side.
”I was director of the psychiatry outpatient clinic at the time. In the mornings, the residents (doctors) would present age, diagnosis and disposition of each case that they had seen the previous week, and we began to get all these sexual referrals.
”The residents would say, `Inorgasmic, so we sent her home,` and I`d say, `What do you mean you sent her home?` And they`d say, `Well, we didn`t know what to do with her.` They sent the premature ejaculators home, the impotents home.
”I said, `You should treat them. Go read Masters and Johnson (William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson, ”Human Sexual Inadequacy”). But they were nervous and said, `Well, we don`t know how.`
”Then, as a full-time teacher, I recognized that if they were going to help patients with sexual problems, someone would have to teach them how.”
Renshaw designed a sexual dysfunction program to do just that. She expected it to last only a couple of years, but she admits she underestimated the response, both from medical professionals and from patients. The clinic opened in 1972 with 20 trainees and 12 couples.
Since then, Renshaw has trained more than 2,600 medical professionals. Physicians, medical students, social workers, nurses, psychologists, ministers, they come from Loyola and from throughout the world to learn from the 10-week course, which includes seven weeks of supervised clinical sex therapy with patients.
To date, 1,300 couples have completed therapy with Renshaw`s staff. Only married couples may participate (solo patients may join other therapy groups that the clinic conducts), and currently 100 couples are on an eight-month wait list.
What the couples will get when their number comes up is seven intensive evening sessions held at Loyola, one each week. Each couple is treated by a team of one male and one female therapist, who also assign sex activities to be completed at home. Each session lasts from three to five or more hours, and the program costs $700.
What they will not get at Loyola is sex-sex with their partners or sex with surrogates. Renshaw, who has never used surrogate sexual partners, said, ”I think the thing that spooks people out (about sex clinics) is surrogates. It`s totally irresponsible.”
As for couples who arrive expecting to do their homework in class, Renshaw says she tells them, ”No such luck. Our biggest problem is space.”
Except for an initial examination by a doctor to rule out physiological causes for sexual problems, clinic participants receive no physical contact from therapists or others in the group. Clinic therapist Kathleen Kelly said, ”People need to be reassured that there`s no touchy-feely in our office, only between married couples at home.”
Kelly, a licensed clinical social worker, has assisted Renshaw for 3 1/2 years. In a typical session, she said, the therapists might meet with both individuals first. Then the male patient and male therapist might consult, as would the female patient and female therapist. Later the patients might meet separately with opposite-sex therapists.
She said: ”We always have at least an hour and a half when Dr. Renshaw will speak to the whole group. But there is no group interaction, no group sharing or viewing of their intimate details. We sit in the same room and watch a film or hear a lecture, but no couple knows other couples` names. So there is confidentiality. We respect their need for privacy.”
The problems that send people to the Loyola clinic are, indeed, private. Among men, impotence and lack of interest in sex rank highest; among women, failure to achieve orgasm and lack of interest. Painful intercourse afflicts both sexes.
Since the clinic started, 103 couples with uncomsummated marriages have sought help, three of them in the most recent session. ”These marriages range from one year to 21 years, unconsummated,” Renshaw said. ”This is supposed to be the sexual revolution, a literate group of people.”
The media-promoted notion that ”everybody but us” is enjoying good sex rubs salt in the wound, Kelly said. ”We get all ages, from young couples to 70-year-olds. They are embarrassed by their problem and ashamed. They need to know they are not alone. Certainly there are people out there who are sexually active, but we don`t hear about the silent people with questions and pain.”
Renshaw takes the shame away with plain language, humor and a blessing, of sorts, Kelly said: ”You`re in a room with 20 people with 20 problems that they are ashamed of, and she is able to stand in front of them and make them laugh and wipe away years of distortion. She tells them, `God gave you those parts to enjoy with your partner.` She presents intercourse as a healthy form of marriage communication.”
Lack of communication about sex sent Du Page residents Don and Mary Jones (not their real names) to Renshaw`s clinic a couple of months ago. ”It was a terrific experience for both of us,” said Don after their last session.
”I`ve had a problem with sporadic impotence for our 20 years of marriage. I had performance anxiety. I became more and more sexually introverted, and it impacted on our whole marriage.”
The program helped the couple shed old taboos and discuss their problems, he said. It not only improved their sex but also the whole relationship. He added, ”It`s been like a new courtship, like newlyweds. We wish we`d known about the clinic 10 years ago. The last seven weeks have changed our lives. We`re looking forward to the next 20 or 30 years.”
Like the Joneses, 80 percent of clinic patients experience improved relationships. The rest are encouraged to seek additional help.
For couples with less urgent problems, Renshaw developed a one-time, five-hour marriage enrichment seminar. It is offered twice a year; the next one is Jan. 18.
Maxine Montes and her husband, John, attended a recent seminar to get a fresh slant on their 39-year-old marriage. ”One of the things my husband liked about Dr. Renshaw,” said Montes, who lives in Maywood, ”is she makes you feel very comfortable talking about these things. She stressed: Don`t compare yourself with others; whatever is good for you is right. She said: `If you think you have a problem, don`t run to a sex clinic right away. Work on it first by yourselves.` ”
”Try self-help first” is staple Renshaw advice. So is she trying to close up shop?
”Absolutely,” she says. ”I will have attained a great goal if I put myself out of business.”
Don`t hold your breath. After each appearance on national television, her staff struggles to respond to thousands of requests for reading lists and clinic information. Phone calls come from Alabama, California, Florida-wherever people are in need.
”I respond to need,” Renshaw says, talking now about why she delayed entering medical school. ”I am an only daughter with three brothers and a mother who decided her daughter should stay home.”
Renshaw stayed, although she had known from the age of 16 that she wanted to become a doctor. She helped with family problems, she worked and saved her money, and when she turned 26, she left. After she earned her M.D., she joined the mission hospital staff, over her mother`s objections.
Later, during a trip to the United States, she met an American economist, Robert Renshaw. ”It was a purely accidental meeting, one week before I was to leave,” she says.”I met Bob, and he just plagued me and came out (to Africa) after me, and we married. And that`s the only reason I returned to the U.S. Otherwise, I`d be cheerfully working at the mission hospital still.”
Robert Renshaw, a Ph.D. and assistant professor of economics at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, remembers writing daily to his future wife across a span of 8,000 miles and two years of separation.
”I guess I write a mean letter when I get down to it,” he reflected modestly.
The letters are long gone, but the marriage has survived for 26 years.
Domeena Renshaw came with her new husband to the United States and eventually put down roots at Loyola. In her years there, she has worked in pediatric psychiatry, as well as human sexuality. Her book ”Sex Talk for a Safe Child” was written for the American Medical Association to help parents teach their kids to avoid sexual abuse.
The Renshaws have no children, but in her office she displays an engraved brass plaque presented by her students to ”Mama Renshaw.”
A South African general practitioner, Dr. Beverley Geiman, referred to Renshaw`s motherly qualities when she described her as ”very warm and giving.” Geiman recently completed the 10-week Loyola sexual dysfunction program for professionals. She hopes to start a sex clinic on the Loyola model in Johannesburg, where she practices.
”Dr. Renshaw is regarded as a world expert in this field.” she said.
Dr. Robert de Vito, professor and chairman of the Loyola psychiatry department, has known Renshaw since she completed her psychiatry residency at Loyola in 1968. ”Domeena has trained thousands of people in the area of sex dysfunction, but she`s had more success abroad in terms of stimulating people to start clinics,” he said. ”It`s happened on every continent, but not so frequently in the United States. I don`t know why.”
De Vito said Loyola medical students and faculty routinely study sexual dysfunction in the clinic. ”Domeena has done a lot of pioneering work,” he said, ”a lot of hard day-to-day work. She has had a lot of offers from other schools, but her commitment here is outstanding. Loyola is her home.”
It is certainly where she spends most of her time. One typical Renshaw work day (for which she kept a log at the request of a reporter) began at her desk at 8:30 in the morning and ended back home in Lombard around midnight.
Along the way, her notations included numerous phone consultations (with the distraught mother of an adult male virgin, with an attorney handling a child sex abuse case, and with a Washington, D.C., newspaper reporter);
responding to a request from a Jesuit priest in Peru for materials on pedophilia and child sex abuse materials; visiting a dying friend at Loyola;
seeing patients; and supervising trainees for the sexual dysfunction clinic.
How long can she continue such a marathon? It depends on whom you ask.
Renshaw says, ”As long as I`m healthy and keep my sense of humor. I have no plans for retirement.”
Her husband says, ”maybe for the next 10 years or so.” And he adds,
”When I married her, she was doing mission medicine at Marianhill. I guess she`s still a missionary doctor. Her focus is now at Stritch School of Medicine at Loyola, but I think with the same outlook and the same goals.”
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To receive a self-help reading list for sexual problems, send a stamped, self-addressed envelope to Dr. Domeena Renshaw, Loyola Sexual Dysfunction Clinic, 2160 S. 1st Ave., Maywood 60153. For more information on the Loyola Sexual Dysfunction Clinic or the Marriage Enrichment Seminar, call
708-216-3750. To order ”Sex Talk for a Safe Child” ($8.90, including shipping and tax; discount available for five or more copies), write: OP 023485, American Medical Association, P.O. Box 2964, Milwaukee, Wis. 53201. ,
