The Insanity of Insane Asylums
Mental institutions have always had a taboo outlook of public opinion and are subject to tacky horror movie plots, scary stories, and fears among the public; but with good reason. Within the 1950’s and 1960’s the amount of admitted persons in mental institutions reached its peak at 560,000 patients. As we look to the so called “treatments” of the time they are borderline medieval torture-not even considering the absurd and outrageous facilities that the patients inhabited. Insane asylums, mental institutions, and mental hospitals are all ironic within themselves. An asylum is an institution to provide shelter and support to the mentally ill but it is always portrayed hellish in almost everyway.
It did not take much to be admitted to a mental hospital in the 50’s and 60’s as records have shown. People were admitted for everything from aggressive outburst and schizophrenia to dementia and tuberculosis. In many cases, people were admitted just because no one could care for them and to simply get them off the streets. Because some illnesses and diseases were so new to society and many people did not understand them, they simply wrote them off as mental illness. Some institutions admitted the mentally disabled as insane; similarly a …show more content…
With the peek of 560,000 patients it wasn’t uncommon to be overcrowded in wards, one method of control was to overdose patients on insulin to free up space. Some hospitals would even allow the doctors to experiment on some of the patients. There is footage of reporters finding patients running free within the hospital unsupervised in chaotic situations. Also during the time it wasn’t uncommon for patients to just go missing. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Chief Bromden talks about the orderlies abusing the patients physically and sexually which was very common in many hospitals of the 50s and
Mental institutions have always had a taboo outlook of public opinion and are subject to tacky horror movie plots, scary stories, and fears among the public; but with good reason. Within the 1950’s and 1960’s the amount of admitted persons in mental institutions reached its peak at 560,000 patients. As we look to the so called “treatments” of the time they are borderline medieval torture-not even considering the absurd and outrageous facilities that the patients inhabited. Insane asylums, mental institutions, and mental hospitals are all ironic within themselves. An asylum is an institution to provide shelter and support to the mentally ill but it is always portrayed hellish in almost everyway.
It did not take much to be admitted to a mental hospital in the 50’s and 60’s as records have shown. People were admitted for everything from aggressive outburst and schizophrenia to dementia and tuberculosis. In many cases, people were admitted just because no one could care for them and to simply get them off the streets. Because some illnesses and diseases were so new to society and many people did not understand them, they simply wrote them off as mental illness. Some institutions admitted the mentally disabled as insane; similarly a …show more content…
With the peek of 560,000 patients it wasn’t uncommon to be overcrowded in wards, one method of control was to overdose patients on insulin to free up space. Some hospitals would even allow the doctors to experiment on some of the patients. There is footage of reporters finding patients running free within the hospital unsupervised in chaotic situations. Also during the time it wasn’t uncommon for patients to just go missing. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Chief Bromden talks about the orderlies abusing the patients physically and sexually which was very common in many hospitals of the 50s and