Nightmare Factories by Troy Rondinone
Author:Troy Rondinone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2019-03-12T16:00:00+00:00
CHAPTER 8
ASYLUMS DON’T WORK
Then the gates swallowed the ambulance-bus and swallowed her as she left the world and entered the underland where all who were not desired, who caught like rough teeth in the cogwheels, who had no place or fit crosswise the one they were hammered into, were carted to repent of their contrariness or to pursue their mad vision down to the pit of terror . . . She was human garbage carried to the dump.
—Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976)
Starting in the late 1950s, the state mental hospital system began to collapse. By 1980, the patient population was at less than a quarter of its mid-century level, despite a huge expansion in the overall US population. This process would be called deinstitutionalization.
This chapter explores deinstitutionalization via books, articles, films, and art that served as a kind of background soundtrack to the demolition of the mental hospital. I highlight the 1970s here, because this was when the anti-asylum critique became most sustained. William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971), for instance, tells us that America was a sick country and that institutional medicine was a frightening failure. Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) served up a banal and terrifying institution that captured psychiatric disillusionment and laid out a terrifying blueprint for future asylum films. The resurrection of silver screen star Frances Farmer brought to light a vast conspiracy of psychiatrists aimed at reducing freedom.
All of these projects, and many more, collected around a single theme: The asylum didn’t work.
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