Mental Asylum Quotes

I think that we're all mentally ill. Those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better - and maybe not all that much better after all.

It is not seen as insane when a fighter, under an attack that will inevitable lead to his death, chooses to take his own life first. In fact, this act has been encouraged for centuries, and is accepted even now as an honorable reason to do the deed. How is it any different when you are under attack by your own mind?

Louisiana is a fresh-air mental asylum.

I was in a mental asylum? When the fuck did that happen?

I, myself, spent 9 years in an insane asylum and never had any suicidal tendencies, but I know that every conversation I had with a psychiatrist during the morning visit made me long to hang myself because I was aware that I could not slit his throat.

Can you find out how owns C and R industries? They bought the old abandoned mental asylum downtown." "That old thing? What are they going to do with it?" "I don't know. I was hoping their overcompensating sign would say, but it just says 'private property' and shouts lots of threats in capital letters, all of which I plan to completely ignore later.

For the first time, Mary understood the attraction of coffee. If you have been up all night, escaping from a burning mental asylum or fighting men who refuse to die when you shoot them in the forehead, or both, coffee is the perfect beverage.

I've invaded the walls of the asylums with my ink pen. The way they look at mental illness won't be the same again

I see now the virtue in madness, for this country knows no law nor any boundary. I pity the poor shades confined to the Euclidean prison that is sanity

God judges men from the inside out; men judge men from the outside in. Perhaps to God, an extreme mental patient is doing quite well in going a month without murder, for he fought his chemical imbalance and succeeded; oppositely, perhaps the healthy, able and stable man who has never murdered in his life yet went a lifetime consciously, willingly never loving anyone but himself may then be subject to harsher judgment than the extreme mental patient. It might be so that God will stand for the weak and question the strong.

Being bored is the price we pay for not being insane.

Oh Christ, he understood more than he wanted to right now. Give me a chance, Louis thought, and I’ll understand myself right into the nearest mental asylum.

It goes so fast, he thought, they don't tell you that, how fast it goes...

Say to a blind man, you’re free, open the door that was separating him from the world, Go, you are free, we tell him once more, and he does not go, he has remained motionless there in the middle of the road, he and the others, they are terrified, they do not know where to go, the fact is that there is no comparison between living in a rational labyrinth, which is, by definition, a mental asylum and venturing forth, without a guiding hand or a dog-leash, into the demented labyrinth of the city, where memory will serve no purpose, for it will merely be able to recall the images of places but not the paths whereby we might get there.

One either cares what others think about him, or cares what others think he thinks about them. If you want to find someone who doesn't care in the slightest what anyone thinks, try a lunatic asylum.

Okay this is going from weird to mental asylum real fast.

The barriers we face in life are so often the ones we create in our minds. As a child I couldn’t open that wooden gate because my body prevented me from doing so. As a teenager it seemed I couldn’t open that door because my mind held me hostage. The world that waited beyond it now was no longer one of safety or escape. Instead, I knew every time that I opened that door, it would be to a life of psychological insecurity and emotional entrapment. She - that cerebral leech who clung to all my thoughts - convinced me of this fact. Only with her could I find and maintain an asylum of mental armour

The very worst thing about being bipolar, depressed, or mentally ill in likely any way, is that any time you’re legitimately sad—any time you’re truly angry—and with good and clear reason, you will be told that you are only feeling as you are because of your illness.

Here I want to stress that perception of losing one’s mind is based on culturally derived and socially ingrained stereotypes as to the significance of symptoms such as hearing voices, losing temporal and spatial orientation, and sensing that one is being followed, and that many of the most spectacular and convincing of these symptoms in some instances psychiatrically signify merely a temporary emotional upset in a stressful situation, however terrifying to the person at the time. Similarly, the anxiety consequent upon this perception of oneself, and the strategies devised to reduce this anxiety, are not a product of abnormal psychology, but would be exhibited by any person socialized into our culture who came to conceive of himself as someone losing his mind.

Had a note from Mr Cherry asking me when I can resume my paper round. I sent a note back to say that due to my mother's desertion I am still in a mental state. This is true. I wore odd socks yesterday without knowing it. One was red and one was green. I must pull myself together. I could end up in a lunatic asylum.

It's an unfortunate word, 'depression', because the illness has nothing to do with feeling sad, sadness is on the human palette. Depression is a whole other beast. It's when your old personality has left town and been replaced by a block of cement with black tar oozing through your veins and mind. This is when you can't decide whether to get a manicure or jump off a cliff. It's all the same. When I was institutionalised I sat on a chair unable to move for three months, frozen in fear. To take a shower was inconceivable. What made it tolerable was while I was inside, I found my tribe - my people. They understood and unlike those who don't suffer, never get bored of you asking if it will ever go away? They can talk medication all hours, day and night; heaven to my ears.

In the United States, the person who led the fight to reform treatment of the mentally ill and to develop asylums was Dorothea Dix. Often neglected in history, Dix was a nurse

When you go with first principles, a giant light goes off in what you think is a city and turns out to be an insane asylum.

I hate the way people react when they learn Charlie spent a few weeks as an in-patient. As if it’s the most horrific thing they’ve ever heard. It’s because it automatically makes them think mental asylum and crazy people, instead of treatment and recovery and learning to manage an eating disorder.

For eight years I was an inmate in a state asylum for the insane. During those years I passed through such unbearable terror that I deteriorated into a wild, frightened creature intent only on survival. And I survived. I was raped by orderlies, gnawed on by rats and poisoned by tainted food. I was chained in padded cells, strapped into strait-jackets and half-drowned in ice baths. And I survived. The asylum itself was a steel trap, and I was not released from its jaws alive and victorious. I crawled out mutilated, whimpering and terribly alone. But I did survive.

If there is one central intellectual reality at the end of the twentieth century, it is that the biological approach to psychiatry--treating mental illness as a genetically influenced disorder of brain chemistry--has been a smashing success. Freud's ideas, which dominated the history of psychiatry for the past half century, are now vanishing like the last snows of winter.

a mental hospital, insanity, an insane asylum, where people were not ashamed to say that they were crazy, where no one stopped doing something they were enjoying just to be nice to others.

If anyone tells you he’s from New Orleans and doesn’t drink, he’s probably not from New Orleans. Louisiana is not a state; it’s an outdoor mental asylum in which millions of people stay bombed most of their lives. That’s not an exaggeration. Cirrhosis is a family heirloom.

The Mississippi flows slowly by and the sun shines clean over everything, and Karena knows Tiff thinks she is crying because of Charles, because her brother is stuck in a mental asylum instead of out and about on this beautiful day the way he should be, healthy and alert and comfortable in his own skin.

In the 1970s, a group of researchers got themselves deliberately confined to mental asylums across United States. They did this by pretending to hear voices. They pretended to hear a voice saying, Empty, Dull and Thud. But as soon as they were admitted to the wards, they stopped pretending and never mention the voice again. And here's the mad part The hospital staff outright refused to believe they were better, and kept them locked up anyway - some of them for months on end -each forced into accepting they had a mental illness, and agreeing to take drugs as a condition of their release. This is what labels do. They stick.

The funny thing about mental hospitals is that they strip away any remaining reason you have to live, but deny you the means to do anything about it. It is fascinating to me that a suicide attempt, by default, legally lands you into the asylum, the psych ward, the loony bin, the nut house—call it what you will, it’s all the same. Perhaps you are crazy, perhaps you are not, but I do not believe that, in itself alone, attempting suicide proves anything at all about your mental state, save that, upon weighing the merits of living and dying, you found that one outweighed the other. Is this crazy? I see nothing insane about it at all. Socially unacceptable to be sure, but not mad.

The most dangerous thing of all, and something he wanted to warn me about above all else, the one thing that had consigned whole regiments of unfortunate young people to the twilight world of insanity, was reading books. This objectionable practice had increased among the younger generation, and Dad was more pleased than the could say to not that I had not yet displayed any such tendencies. Lunatic asylums were overflowing with folk who'd been reading too much. Once upon a time they'd been just like you and me, physically strong, straightforward, cheerful, and well balanced. Then they'd started reading. Most often by chance. A bout of flu perhaps, with a few days in bed. An attractive book cover that had aroused some curiosity. And suddenly the bad habit had taken hold. The first book had led to another. Then another, and another, all links in a chain that led straight down into the eternal night of mental illness. It was impossible to stop. It was worse than drugs. It might just be possible, if you were very careful, to look at the occasional book that could teach you something, such as encyclopedias or repair manuals. The most dangerous kind of book was fiction-- that's where all the brooding was sparked and encouraged. Damnit all! Addictive and risky products like that should only be available in state-regulated monopoly stores, rationed and sold only to those with a license, and mature in age.

Reason to live, they repeat like a pop song, The bones of a beloved emperor, and I, the motionless chariot trying to drag them home with forced hope.

He hoped the local mental asylum had Wi-Fi.

NINA Your life is beautiful. TRIGORIN I see nothing especially lovely about it. [He looks at his watch] Excuse me, I must go at once, and begin writing again. I am in a hurry. [He laughs] You have stepped on my pet corn, as they say, and I am getting excited, and a little cross. Let us discuss this bright and beautiful life of mine, though. [After a few moments' thought] Violent obsessions sometimes lay hold of a man: he may, for instance, think day and night of nothing but the moon. I have such a moon. Day and night I am held in the grip of one besetting thought, to write, write, write! Hardly have I finished one book than something urges me to write another, and then a third, and then a fourth--I write ceaselessly. I am, as it were, on a treadmill. I hurry for ever from one story to another, and can't help myself. Do you see anything bright and beautiful in that? Oh, it is a wild life! Even now, thrilled as I am by talking to you, I do not forget for an instant that an unfinished story is awaiting me. My eye falls on that cloud there, which has the shape of a grand piano; I instantly make a mental note that I must remember to mention in my story a cloud floating by that looked like a grand piano. I smell heliotrope; I mutter to myself: a sickly smell, the colour worn by widows; I must remember that in writing my next description of a summer evening. I catch an idea in every sentence of yours or of my own, and hasten to lock all these treasures in my literary store-room, thinking that some day they may be useful to me. As soon as I stop working I rush off to the theatre or go fishing, in the hope that I may find oblivion there, but no! Some new subject for a story is sure to come rolling through my brain like an iron cannonball. I hear my desk calling, and have to go back to it and begin to write, write, write, once more. And so it goes for everlasting. I cannot escape myself, though I feel that I am consuming my life. To prepare the honey I feed to unknown crowds, I am doomed to brush the bloom from my dearest flowers, to tear them from their stems, and trample the roots that bore them under foot. Am I not a madman? Should I not be treated by those who know me as one mentally diseased? Yet it is always the same, same old story, till I begin to think that all this praise and admiration must be a deception, that I am being hoodwinked because they know I am crazy, and I sometimes tremble lest I should be grabbed from behind and whisked off to a lunatic asylum. The best years of my youth were made one continual agony for me by my writing. A young author, especially if at first he does not make a success, feels clumsy, ill-at-ease, and superfluous in the world. His nerves are all on edge and stretched to the point of breaking; he is irresistibly attracted to literary and artistic people, and hovers about them unknown and unnoticed, fearing to look them bravely in the eye, like a man with a passion for gambling, whose money is all gone. I did not know my readers, but for some reason I imagined they were distrustful and unfriendly; I was mortally afraid of the public, and when my first play appeared, it seemed to me as if all the dark eyes in the audience were looking at it with enmity, and all the blue ones with cold indifference. Oh, how terrible it was! What agony!

He'll have to do without me, Jamie thought, not looking back. And then clearly, as if he'd been told, he knew Grenville /could/ do without him. There was somewhere else he had to go now, somewhere else he had to be.

Luna Hills Trans Asylum. There was something extra creepy about giving a fucked up place a sane, serene name to play down the reality. Why not just call it Sanitarium For The Bat Shit Crazy, or Forgotten Hope Mental Ward?

He flushes slightly. “I was mad about him when I was fifteen.” “How didn’t I know this?” I say indignantly. “We tell each other everything.” “Not anymore,” Dylan adds hastily, looking at Gabe, but he shrugs unconcerned. “Don’t try and cover it up, Dylan. Jude’s our very own Camilla - the third person in our relationship.” “Why am I the old woman in this scenario?” I say indignantly. “I want to be the younger, much fitter princess, who captured people’s hearts and minds.” “You would have been, babe,” Dylan says hastily. “And you’d look way better with a tiara than she does.” “I would,” I nod firmly. “I would be a very desirable addition to the royal family, and a very stabilizing influence, if I do say so myself. I also have a full head of my own hair.” Gabe shakes his head. “I’m worried that I not only follow these odd flights of fancy, but I find myself actually wanting to weigh in with my own opinions.” “What did you want to say?” Dylan asks immediately, but he shakes his head. “I said I wanted to, not that I was going to. I’m looking through the windows of the mental asylum, not going through the door.

Have you ever seen a rabbit go to a pharmacy, a hospital, or a mental asylum?” he asks rhetorically. “They don’t look for medicine, they heal themselves or die. Humans aren’t so simple; they’ve let technology get in the way of who they really are.” It’s an idea that I’ve thought a lot about, and one that doesn’t always sit comfortably. Yes the modern world has its drawbacks, but nature can also be brutal. So I interrupt the budding diatribe. “But rabbits get eaten by wolves,” I say. Hof doesn’t skip a beat at my interjection. “Yes, they know fight and flight. The wolf chases them and they die. But everything dies one day. It is just that in our case we aren’t eaten by wolves. Instead, without predators, we’re being eaten by cancer, by diabetes, and our own immune systems. There’s no wolf to run from, so our bodies eat themselves.

Luna Hills Trans Asylum. There was something extra creepy about giving a fucked up place a sane, serene name to play down the reality. Why not just call it Sanitarium For The Bat Shit Crazy, or Forgotten Hope Mental Ward? Because they didn’t name these places to impress the insane, that’s why.

One of them hasn't got a uniform on or plainclothes either like the rest. He has on the white coat that is my nightmare and my horror. And in the crotch of one arm he is upending two long poles intertwined with canvas. The long-drawn-out death within life. The burial-alive of the mind, covering it over with fresh graveyard earth each time it tries to struggle through to the light. In this kind of death you never finish dying. ("New York Blues")

Eric dubbed his pranks “the missions.” As they got under way, he ruminated about misfit geniuses in American society. He didn’t like what he saw. Eric was a voracious reader, and he had just gobbled up John Steinbeck’s The Pastures of Heaven, which includes a fable about the idiot savant Tularecito. The young boy had extraordinary gifts that allowed him to see a world his peers couldn’t even imagine—exactly how Eric was coming to view himself, though without Tularecito’s mental shortcomings. Tularecito’s peers failed to see his gifts and treated him badly. Tularecito struck back violently, killing one of his antagonists. He was imprisoned for life in an insane asylum. Eric did not approve. “Tularecito did not deserve to be put away,” he wrote in a book report. “He just needed to be taught to control his anger. Society needs to treat extremely talented people like Tularecito much better.” All they needed was more time, Eric argued—gifted misfits could be taught what was right and wrong, what was acceptable to society. “Love and care is the only way,” he said.

The ever-present tangle of lies tightened around her like a hunter's net. The more she pushed it away, the more it clung to her like sticky, spindly spiderwebs. But the truth had to remain hidden inside the godforsaken asylum and inside the one of silence that was Uma, Vijay, and her, and tragically enough, Vikram's mother.

His first thought – what felt like his first thought ever, it formed so slowly in his brain – was that she looked like a doll. Just like a doll. Her eyes were large and bright and feline; her hair was chestnut, brushed to a hardwood shine, parted sharply and flowing to her thighs; her lips were cupid’s-bow-cute; her head was tilted to one side on a long, long neck. She had skin that had never seen sunlight, and wore no expression at all. He noticed her. And she noticed, and kept on noticing, him. Stanley looked down for a third and longer time. It wasn’t polite to stare. Not at girls. Or anyone. But especially not girls. Not even girls who looked like perfect porcelain dolls.

Clennon King, a black student who applied to the University of Mississippi in 1958, was forcefully committed to a mental asylum. The presiding judge ruled that a black person must surely be insane to think that he could be admitted to the University of Mississippi. The vicious circle: a chance historical situation is translated into a rigid social system.

Closing the asylums has not brought us any closer to working out how we should respond to mental illness. We still prefer to think that out of mind should mean out of sight.

But cowards are the worst monsters. Monsters with no prey but themselves.

Jack asked himself: Would he have wanted to live out his life as a placid, contented, lobotomized Ferdinand the Bull? No. Then, what right did he have to inflict such a fate on anybody?

By the mid-twentieth century, segregation in the former Confederate states was probably worse than in the late nineteenth century. Clennon King, a black student who applied to the University of Mississippi in 1958, was forcefully committed to a mental asylum. The presiding judge ruled that a black person must surely be insane to think that he could be admitted to the University of Mississippi.

What was there about us, in Belize [asylum], so different from the girls playing bridge and gossiping and studying in college to which I would return? Those girls, too, sat under bell jars of a sort.

The largest concentrations of the seriously mentally ill reside in Los Angeles County, New York’s Rikers Island, and Chicago’s Cook County—jails that are in many ways now de facto asylums. As someone

I think more people would stay active in church, if they didn't get so offended by the actions of members. Sometimes, you have to view places of worship as free mental health clinics, in order to deal with the piety or hypocrisy. Parishioners are a wounded souls in various stages of healing, who are being treated by angels, with credentials from the University of Hard Knocks. Some take their therapy seriously and try to practice what they learned. Yet, others down the sacrament like a healing dose of Prozac, with no other effort required. When you keep this in mind, you won't feel so annoyed by the personalities you encounter.

Barbee had wondered about insanity, sometimes with a brooding dread - for his own father, whom he scarcely remembered, had died in the forbidding stone pile of the state asylum. He had vaguely supposed that a mental breakdown must be somehow strange and thrilling, with an exciting conflict of horrible depression and wild elation. But perhaps it was more often like this, just a baffled apathetic retreat from problems grown too difficult to solve.

So the question now is: Why does the mind think in terms of habit, the habit of relationship, the habit of ideas, the habit of beliefs, and so on? Why? Because essentially it is seeking to be secure, to be safe, to be permanent, is it not? The mind hates to be uncertain, so it must have habits as a means of security. A mind that is secure can never be free from habit, but only the mind that is completely insecure -- which doesn't mean ending up in an asylum or a mental hospital. The mind that is completely insecure, that is uncertain, inquiring, perpetually finding out, that is dying to every experience, to everything it has acquired, and is therefore in a state of not-knowing -- only such a mind can be free of habit, and that is the highest form of thinking.

Arkham Asylum, founded by Dr. Amadeus Arkham in the early nineteen hundreds, was named after Elizabeth Arkham, Amadeus’ mother. Elizabeth had long suffered from mental illness and eventually committed suicide, although legend had it that Amadeus had actually euthanized her. Whatever

She had been concerned before about the lack of treatment for those who were genuinely mentally ill. But this course he had now prescribed went the other way. As one patient put it, most of the doctors that are employed in lunatic asylums do much more to aggravate the disease than they do to cure it.

It's true,' replied Doris with a sniff in Bessy's direction to make her sensible of a victory, even if a minor one. 'It is amazing how so many people go insane. One day a man is a normal, friendly husband and the next he suddenly becomes a raging schizoid and slays his wife and himself as well. The result of what cause? Why, perhaps he chanced to find some schoolgirl treasure of another beau who had been his greatest rival and is stunned to discover that she secretly retains this. But usually the matter is not so simple, you know. Next to nothing may happen, jarring awake some sleeping monstrosity in a man's complex mental machinery and turning him from a sane person to a mentally sick individual. It is wholly impossible to say when a man is sane, for' -she tittered- 'scarce one of us is normal.' 'You mean - it might happen to any of us?' 'Of course,' said Doris, charmed by all this interest. 'One moment we are seated here, behaving normally and the next some tiny thing, a certain voice, a certain combination of thoughts may throw out the balance wheel of our intellects and we become potential inmates for asylums the rest of our lives. No, not one of us knows when the world will cease to be a normal, ordinary place. You know, no one ever knows when he goes insane: He supposes it is the world altering, not himself. Rooms become peopled with strange shapes and beings, sounds distort themselves into awful cries and, poof! we are judged insane.' 'Poof -' said Jacob, feeling weak and ill. ("He Didn't Like Cats")

Yet even as the hospitals were being closed, psychiatry’s reach was spreading wide outside the asylum, like ground ivy, into Hollywood, government, education, child-rearing, politics, and big business, enjoying a sudden social cachet while turning its back on the people who needed help the most—the seriously mentally ill.

[...] Nor were the boards particularly interested in hiring devoted physicians like Kirkbride to run their asylums. Instead, they sought to hire superintendents who could manage budgets wisely and were willing to scrimp on spending for patients and, in the best manner of political appointees, grease the patronage wheels. [...] Treatment outcomes steadily declined.

Barbee had always wondered about mental institutions. He thought of taking notes for a feature story on this adventure at Glennhaven, as the evening wore on, began to seem remarkable for utter lack of anything noteworthy. It began to appear as a fragile never-never land, populated with timid souls in continual retreat from the real world outside and even from one another within.

I based the appalling conditions and treatment of the women at Bothwell House on reports about the infamous York Asylum and Bedlam Hospital found in the excellent book Bedlam by Paul Chambers. While York and Bedlam were public hospitals, a large number of private madhouses, as they were called, were run as profitable businesses by people who often had no experience or interest in treating those living with mental illness.

To the men and women who changed Cheryl Hersha's life, she was a continuation of the research that had first been conducted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Dr. Morton Prince. He encountered a woman named Miss Beauchamp, a nursing student who was referred to the psychiatrist because of health problems. As he worked with her, Prince discovered that she had four separate personalities (dissociated ego states) that existed independently of one another within the same body. Though he tried, Dr. Prince never understood Miss Beauchamp, nor was he able to help her. When he died, his wife had the woman committed to an insane asylum for the rest of her life. However, Prince's careful documentation of Beauchamp's symptoms, actions and family history (extreme child abuse beginning before the age of seven) provided information needed to develop the techniques for contemporary, routinely successful treatment of what would be called Multiple Personality Disorder.

In 2001 New York came under attack, and thousands of people simply evaporated, leaving behind only dust and bits of gold Rolex watches. We were told that we had nothing to worry about, that we should go shopping. I was eager to please my country, for shopping had long been an answer for me, but what I couldn't pay for, I stole. I started to accumulate stuff I felt would make me feel whole: I surrounded myself with symbols of status. I believed the TV commercials with all my heart. I felt that those material things I was being sold defined me.

Sometimes Christian good is hard to be around. It’s not of this world, and the juxtaposition jars. For example, Jean Vanier spent seven years in the British navy, starting in 1942. Later in life he noticed the way people with mental disabilities were mistreated and discarded by society into miserable asylums. He visited the asylums and noticed that nobody in them was crying. “When they realize that nobody cares, that nobody will answer them, children no longer cry. It takes too much energy. We cry out only when there is hope that someone may hear us.” He bought a little house near Paris and started a community for the mentally disabled. Before long there were 134 such communities in thirty-five countries. Vanier exemplifies a selflessness that is almost spooky. He thinks and cares so little of himself. He lives as almost pure gift. People who meet him report that this can have an unnerving effect. Vanier walked out of a society that celebrates the successful and the strong to devote his life purely to those who are weak. He did it because he understands his own weakness. “We human beings are all fundamentally the same,” he wrote. “We all belong to a common, broken humanity. We all have wounded, vulnerable hearts. Each one of us needs to feel appreciated and understood; we all need help.

A few years ago a practising Harley Street psychiatrist, who was dabbling in Buddhism, came to see me. I opened the conversation by saying 'At some time in his life, every intelligent man questions himself about the purpose of his existence.' Immediately, and with the most manifest disapproval, the psychiatrist replied 'Anybody who thinks such thoughts is mentally diseased.' Thus with a single gesture, he swept half-a-dozen major philosophers (some of whom have held chairs in universities—which guarantees their respectability if not their philosophy) into the lunatic asylum—the criminal lunatic asylum, to judge from his tone. I have never seen a man in such a funk.

I arrive, by a snow-covered path, at a kind of chateau. The room I enter by is covered all over with several inches of snow - even on the furniture and the ceiling. Shining in through the window are fierce, fluorescent advertisements in blue and red. I walk through the huge rooms secretively. I once lived here. Voices come near. I feel worried, since these are important men and I have no right to be here. But their voices change, their eyes change too, and suddenly they become mental defectives. The mansion is an asylum and indeed a nurse is stretched out on a long table in the peristyle. I wake up, retaining an exact impression of having once been mad myself in this very place, in a previous life.

Is it really that helpful, Mr. Duke, to expose these damaged men—and let us tell you how very damaged they are, one way or another, many of them in childhood through abuse and neglect, and some of them would be better off in a mental institution or an asylum for recovering drug addicts, much more suitable for them than teaching them four-hundred-year-old words—is it helpful to expose these vulnerable men to traumatic situations that can trigger anxiety and panic and flashbacks, or, worse, dangerous aggressive behavior? Situations such as political assassinations, civil wars, witchcraft, severed heads, and little boys being smothered by their evil uncle in a dungeon? Much of this is far too close to the lives they have already been leading. Really, Mr. Duke, do you want to run those risks and take those responsibilities upon you?

The Altamont Correctional Facility had originally been built as a hospital for the criminally insane, a hundred and fifty years ago. The Altamont Lunatic Asylum, as it was then called, was a grand Victorian Gothic complex of spires and crenellated towers. Its forbidding red-brick walls were stained dark with soot from a century of internal-combustion engines. Some forty years ago the mental hospital was shut down and converted into a medium-security prison, but it still looked like the sort of place a homicidal maniac escapes from, then terrorizes the nearby summer camp. It also reminded me a little of the high school I’d gone to in Malden. They’d done some renovation since the days of straitjackets and lobotomies. There was a concrete perimeter wall thirty feet high, topped with coils of razor wire, watchtowers, and banks of high-mast lights. Inside the walls, the old Gothic prison complex was surrounded by a luxuriant green lawn that wouldn’t have been out of place at Pebble Beach.

Insanity can be a heavy cross to bear; I mean look at all those people in loony bins compared to those that are free and walking the streets – a tiny percentage are classed as mad. The incidence of mental problems amongst people is said to be rising, so what do they go and do, they cut the amount of asylums by half! Whoever makes these decisions has to be a loon and a half!

Philip Bartholomew, had hacked his wife and children to pieces before he disappeared and was never heard from again. To add to the gruesome legend of the Schram residence, the family before the Bartholomew’s met a grisly death at the hands of a mental patient who had escaped from the Rothschild asylum. The deranged maniac had chained up the husband, wife, and two children, and hacking off one limb at a time, had made a meal of them for three months.

For a number of years, a serial killer roamed Columbia, killing victim after victim. After the body count had reached 300, the police had just about enough clues to identify the perpetrator, Pedro Lopez, and thankfully caught him. At his trial he pleaded insanity, and was sent to a mental asylum. Just four years later, doctors there declared Lopez sane and released him. His current whereabouts are unknown.

trephining.

Clennon King, a black student who applied to the University of Mississippi in 1958, was forcefully committed to a mental asylum.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Harari, Yuval Noah) - Your Highlight on Location 2259-2262 | Added on Monday, March 2, 2015 10:01:42 PM By the mid-twentieth century, segregation in the former Confederate states was probably worse than in the late nineteenth century. Clennon King, a black student who applied to the University of Mississippi in 1958, was forcefully committed to a mental asylum. The presiding judge ruled that a black person must surely be insane to think that he could be admitted to the University of Mississippi.

For a number of years, a serial killer roamed Columbia, killing victim after victim. After the body count had reached 300, the police had just about enough clues to identify the perpetrator, Pedro Lopez, and thankfully caught him. At his trial he pleaded insanity, and was sent to a mental asylum. Just four years later, doctors there declared Lopez sane and released him. His current whereabouts are unknown. After an earthquake in China, the generous tobacco companies stepped in to pay for the rebuilding of the area’s schools. However,

From the 1940s to the ’60s, under government auspices, Quebec doctors employed by the religious communities falsified the medical records of the illegitimate orphans. They pronounced them ‘mentally unfit’ and ‘mentally retarded.’ In the blink of an eye, thousands of perfectly healthy children found themselves interned in asylums, mixed in with actual mental patients, for years on end. Simply because they had had the misfortune of being born illegitimate. Those children are now adults, and they’re still known as the Duplessis Orphans.

Käthe was among the most disabled patients in Happich’s asylum: since her birth, she had never spoken a word; her movements were restricted to uncontrolled spasms; she seemingly took no notice of anything happening around her; and the only sounds she made were animal-like utterances. So, when she became seriously ill with tuberculosis, Pastor Happich was astounded to enter her room during her final hours and find her singing. ‘‘We did not believe our eyes and ears,” he recounted. “Käthe, who never spoke one word, entirely mentally disabled from birth on, sang the dying songs to herself. Specifically, she sang ‘Where does the soul find its home, its peace? Peace, peace, heavenly peace!’ over and over again. For half an hour she sang. Then, she quietly died”.

As Mrs. Carter in another context observed, there are adequate financial resources available to fund adequate mental health if we simply invest in the right kinds of programs—the ones that we know work—rather than squandering millions and millions of dollars and lives in jails and prisons.

Another example, one that touches more people, is the nursing home industry. Numerous studies have shown that living at home, in a house or an apartment, is better psychologically, more fulfilling, and cheaper than living in nursing homes.14 Yet these institutions prosper when federal programs that foster living in the community are cut. There are also funding disincentives that the U.S. Congress, through Medicare and Medicaid, has created to ensure the profit bonanza of nursing homes. According to the activist disability journal Mouth (1995), there are 1.9 million people with disabilities living in nursing homes at an annual cost of $40,784, although it would cost only $9,692 a year to provide personal assistance services so the same people could live at home. Sixty-three percent of this cost is taxpayer funded. In 1992, 77,618 people with developmental disabilities (DD) lived in state-owned facilities at an average annual cost of $82,228, even though it would cost $27,649 for the most expensive support services to live at home. There are 150,257 people with mental illness living in tax-funded asylums at an average annual cost of $58,569. Another 19,553 disabled veterans also live in institutions, costing the Veterans Administration a whopping $75,641 per person.15 It is illogical that a government would want to pay more for less. It is illogical until one studies the amount of money spent by the nursing home lobby. Nursing homes are a growth industry that many wealthy people, including politicians, have wisely invested in. The scam is simple: get taxpayers to fund billions of dollars to these institutions which a few investors divide up. The idea that nursing homes are compassionate institutions or necessary resting places has lost much of its appeal recently, but the barrier to defunding them is built on a paternalism that eschews human dignity. As we have seen with public housing programs in the United States, the tendency is to warehouse (surplus) people in concentrated sites. This too has been the history with elderly people and people with disabilities in nursing homes. These institutions then can serve as a mechanism of social control and, at the same time, make some people wealthy.

seesawing between extreme distress and uncontrollable laughter, like a woman in a Victorian mental asylum.

Onanism was hardly murder. Masturbation did not fall within the category of mania but instead was thought to cause mental and physical deterioration. I’d witnessed attempted cures involving mechanical restraints, surgery and moral discipline, most often delivered in clinical settings. None of which had probably been offered Mr. Tarski. I’d entered the cell expecting a monster. I left having met a simpleton. Tarski was not the Shoreditch killer.

Maybe I’m going crazy, but I swore I’d never go there again. I see the edge of the pond and feel the dangling willow branches tangle in my hair as if it were yesterday. The water pulls at me like Velcro, clinging, drawing me in. Why can I remember that from so many years ago and not where I put the bread today? I know one thing: They will not put me in an asylum for the mentally deranged. Not again.

Do you think your dad—” “Not yet, and no. But the sheriff and some state troopers were over. I heard some stuff. They think the body’s been in there at least ten or fifteen years.” Excited as she was by all the action, it also made her sad. “Can you believe that? Not knowing where your kid has been for the last fifteen years. Not knowing if she’s still alive or dead.” When Laura Lynn and Marcus exchanged a look, she frowned. “What?” “Do you know how many kids die around here? Or go missing?” When Mandy shook her head, Marcus continued. “A lot. Like, a lot a lot.” “How?” she asked. “Why?” “Lots of reasons,” Laura Lynn said. “Cancer. Running away. Murder. There are lots of stories like that. Kids going crazy and sent to insane asylums.” Marcus sat straighter in his chair. “I don’t believe all of them. Jake used to try to freak me out by telling me if I didn’t clean my room, all the kids from the mental hospital would escape and eat me alive.” He glanced to the side and shook his head. “What an asshat.” “Who’s Jake?” Mandy asked. “My older brother. He’s in college now.” Marcus started in on his sandwich, talking through a mouthful of food. “But he said his friend’s brother died that way. Some rare disease or something. Totally incurable.” “That’s pretty weird,” Mandy said. “Maybe that’s what happened to the girl in the septic tank,” Laura Lynn offered. “Maybe she went crazy and fell in.” “And what?” Marcus asked. “Her parents just closed it up and forgot about her? I doubt it.” “Then it was probably murder,” Mandy said. Another thrill went through her, but a twinge of fear followed this one. “We should look into it. Do our own investigation.” Laura Lynn and Marcus both looked down at their plates. Marcus was the first to answer. “I don’t know about that.” “What?” Mandy felt confused. She had figured at least Marcus would be into the idea, even if Laura Lynn wasn’t. “Aren’t you a computer genius? You could help me solve the case! We’d be heroes.” “It’s not worth it.” When he looked up again, he was deadly serious. “A lot of people have gone missing over the years, Mandy. Not just kids. It’s better to just keep your head down. Don’t cause any trouble.” Mandy blanched. When she looked at Laura Lynn for support, she saw her friend nodding in agreement. Mandy sat back in her chair with a huff, the turkey and cheese sandwich untouched. So much for showing Bear she could take care of herself by solving this on her own. 9 Bear pulled his truck next to McKinnon’s cruiser and put it in park. He hopped out and met her around the side of her car. “A graveyard? This is about to get real interesting, or real weird.” “Let’s hope it gets interesting,” McKinnon said. The slam of her door echoed through the surrounding trees, and the two of them trudged their way up a set of steps to the cemetery. Bear had passed it a few times as he’d driven around town. It was the biggest within a twenty-mile radius, but it wasn’t huge. The gravestones were crammed near each other, filling the entire plot of land to the brim. There was a short wrought-iron fence around the perimeter and a plaque that read “April Meadows Cemetery” in block letters. A few trees were scattered around, along with a couple of larger headstones, but most of the markers were small and modest. The paths were skinny and winding, as though they had been an afterthought. “What’re we doing here?” Bear

We all have days where we want to give in and surrender, but those are the days where we have to fight harder. To claw our way back. On those days where you don't feel strong enough, then I'll be there to help bring you back to yourself, to lend you my strength

Indeed, some of the buildings were gargantuan: Greystone Park State Hospital, which opened in 1876 as the New Jersey State Asylum for the Insane at Morristown, was purported to have the largest continuous foundation in the United States, surpassed only by the Pentagon some seventy-seven years later.

Do you accept reality, or shall the narcissistic individual have the absolute right to live in their own permanent fantasy world, and compel everyone else to go along with their fantasy? When the lunatic in a mental asylum says he is Napoleon, we must bellow, 'Vive l’Empereur!' and join his Grande Armée, and all march to Waterloo to meet our fate.

In the mid-1800s, American activist Dorothea Dix deployed her sizable inheritance to devote herself to these issues with a fierceness of purpose that hasn’t been matched since. She traveled more than thirty thousand miles across America in three years to reveal the brutalities wrought upon the mentally ill, describing “the saddest picture of human suffering and degradation,” a woman tearing off her own skin, a man forced to live in an animal stall, a woman confined to a belowground cage with no access to light, and people chained in place for years. Clearly, the American system hadn’t improved much on Europe’s old “familial” treatments. Dix, a tireless advocate, called upon the Massachusetts legislature to take on the “sacred cause” of caring for the mentally unwell during a time when women were unwelcome in politics. Her efforts helped found thirty-two new therapeutic asylums on the philosophy of moral treatment. Dorothea Dix died in 1887, the same year that our brave Nellie Bly went undercover on Blackwell Island, in essence continuing Dix’s legacy by exposing how little had truly changed.

Marriage is called an ‘institution’ because you must be somewhat mental to get into it. You first seek asylum but end up living in one. You don’t believe me? Well, in Spanish ‘Esposas’ means wives as well as handcuffs. But hey, that’s nothing but a linguistic coincidence.

If I had a dollar for every time someone called me crazy, I’d build a mental asylum and check them into it one by one.

Sometimes I sit quietly and wonder why I'm not in a mental asylum

By the early 1800s, these prison/asylums in western Europe were, therefore, populated mostly by criminals, drunkards, heretics and the blasphemous, the unemployed, the homeless, and the physically handicapped, but only occasionally by the people we today would think of as having mental illnesses or intellectual disabilities. The only thing the residents had in common was that they didn’t work.

Nor were there insane asylums, just general asylums for the lawless and unproductive. Some of the first insanity laws in Italy and England during the nineteenth century stipulated that harmless mentally ill patients should live with their families, even if it meant they were confined to a small outbuilding or chained to a tree.17

Michael had gotten sick amid the ruins of a demolished system. The wall dividing many things—including the asylum and the street—had come down while we were growing up. So had the distinction between severe mental illness and what Freud called “the psychopathology of everyday life.

Woodwork proved expensive, so the hospital opted for wicker caskets—a widespread practice at poorhouses and insane asylums at the time that some say spawned the colloquialism “basket cases.

Treatment of the insane was different back then, along with the definition of what it meant to be mentally ill. He was just doing what was expected of him at the time. As far as his reasons for admitting your real father to the asylum, we can’t be sure.

It wasn’t something I had expected her to say. The bars, yes, I could understand. There were more than a few times I’d woken up in an ally to the beeping of a garbage truck, the dawn light like needles in my eyes, no idea how I’d gotten on that pile of musty cardboard, those memories permanently blotted from my brain. I knew how close I’d come to losing it all, to joining Billie on the other side, but I was better now. Or at least better enough to get through the day. But the asylum? That was a whole other level of mental instability, a level I’d been at only once in my life. It was a low blow.

Every sort of family intrigue. One brother mentally “defective,” whose plight surely informed the quietly rending lines: The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirmed case, He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother’s bedroom … Another brother a fatal drinker, leaving a widowed sister-in-law who ended up a prostitute in the streets. Loved his mother passionately through her life.

Life, simply for life's sake, is obscene. I'm so grateful that I live in a right-to-die state. "Keep your laws off of my body" definitely refers to more than the abortion issue. How DARE they try to make the decision for someone else? Suicide is liberty. For a terminally ill person, it can mean death with dignity, versus months and even years of suffering. It's not a popular view, for sure, especially regarding mental illness. However, the resulting loss of liberty, privacy and personal rights after an unsuccessful attempt is beyond cruel, in my eyes. Anyone who has spent time in an asylum can tell you that if you weren't 'crazy' going in, you'll lose your mind in there. To be talked down to like a child and patronized as a 'lesser' person takes its toll. I have a feeling that this post may get me into trouble, but I felt as though it had to be said...

Mental illness in our society is still not being properly addressed. It’s the twenty-first century.

I come from a family with a history of mental trauma.