Tag: histmental2023

I’ve been having a bit of a Green Day phase as of late and had the good luck of stumbling on the “Basket Case” music video, which is set in a psychiatric hospital. The video was really interesting to me because it itself seemed conflicted about the stance it was taking on the psychiatric hospital. At times, it utilizes some horror imagery — distorted colors and images, people wearing strange masks, the like — and it ends with the band being locked in seemingly against their will, or at least as an act that they’re not happy about. However, at other points in the video, it seems to view parts of the hospital more positively; for example, it is the attendants who bring the band their instruments and help them to start playing the song to begin with. The video portrays a really interesting mix of views on mental health practices that reminded me a lot of the conflicted feelings about various methods being helpful in some ways and harmful in others that we’ve seen going all the way back to Kirkbride.

This was a video that I came across while doing research for my digital project but ultimately decided not to use. It is a video tour of the Fulton State Hospital in Missouri, which was built in the 1800s. Reading in chapter six of Tomes about the struggles that people like Curwen had with maintaining their institutions immediately reminded me of this video and the issues of out of date equipment and the way that the building was largely ill suited to caring for patients that seems to have remained a struggle in mental health care long after just the time period covered by Tomes.

Link to article HERE.

This article from the New York Times Magazine entitled “The Therapy Issue: Does Therapy Really Work? Let’s Unpack that” addresses author Susan Dominus’ struggles with finding success in therapy and then the research that followed to answer the question of how effective modern talk therapy really is, as well as what some of the different ways professionals in the field envision the current model of psychiatric care being advanced forward. One of the key points Dominus made was that there is this reluctance to consider the idea that talk therapy is not always beneficial to the patient both within the field itself and within the popular opinion of those who utilize or seek therapy; this immediately was reminiscent of the point that a number of readings have made including Tomes and Sadowksy that there was never one single patient experience within the asylum system and that more recent works on psychiatric history tend to focus overwhelmingly on the very negative experiences. This article proposes that a similar phenomenon occurs regarding modern talk therapy, but rather than rejecting ways that early treatments were helpful for some, the idea that therapy can be unhelpful or harmful are frequently dismissed. This article also discusses the patient-therapist bond as an important component in the success of therapy and indicative of how beneficial a client will find working with a specific therapist to be; this concept appeared similar to what Shorter’s identified as a key aspect of the asylum: the doctor-patient relationship.

Hi, my name is Morgan. My pronouns are she/her and I am a senior history major; this is my final semester at Mary Washington. I primarily study Russian and Soviet history, as well as state-run biological weapons programs in the mid to late 20th century. I primarily took this class because I needed a 400 level course to graduate and like morning classes, but I’m really looking forward to getting to explore this subject matter more. I’ve encountered the topic of what mental health and mental health care have look liked historically primarily through literature — I was a big horror fan when I was younger and the abandoned haunted asylum was, in my experience, one of the most common recurring tropes in mediocre young adult horror, and it’s come up quite a bit in 19th century British and Russian literature that I’ve read as well although tonally it’s quite different — so I’m curious to see what the real life basis for these literary topes are, as well as how they might have evolved from changes in popular perception of mental health.