I stepped out of my car and stood in the crowded parking lot and looked up at the menacing building before me. The old brick building towered above the trees and had twisted vines that reached the roof. The asylum was in extreme seclusion for it was the only construction within twenty miles of any other edifices. It had been fifteen years since I had been here last. The familiar building evoked a sullen memory of the final visit that I paid my sister right before she died. She had been incarcerated here since she had accidentally stabbed our babysitter because her imaginary friend told her to. She spent five years in the sanitarium before she died of inexplicable circumstances. It was because of her that I chose to study child psychology and I had my own practice, but I also consulted on the occasional criminal case. Earlier in the week I had been called by the chief of the homicide unit of the NYPD asking for my special expertise in questioning an impossible suspect. I hesitantly agreed and drove the four hours here today.
I was directed down a never ending corridor until I spotted room number 413. I stood in the viewing room and looked into the cell. The room was dreadfully dull. The walls were covered with quilted puffy white squares of padding. Bright fluorescent lights flickered every so often. The child sat with her legs crossed in the middle of the room. Her wrists had been contained by lambskin lined restraints. I could see her lips moving and her hands gesture but I could not see other people in the room. The girl was wearing a light pink corduroy jumper and a striped shirts. Her hair had been tightly confined to neat braids and her cherubic cheeks were dusted with freckles and rosey. Her imaged conjured up an identical ...
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“How did that little girl do something so unimaginable,” I asked.
This girl could not possibly be to blame. I watched as her lips began to move again. I pressed the button so I could hear what she was saying.
“Did I do a good job? Are you proud of me?” Gracie asked the empty room.
“I didn’t tell her, it’s okay mommy,” she replied cautiously.
“Are you proud of me? I made the monsters go away,” the young girl said.
I walked back into the room and stood close to the door. I waited briefly to decide what to ask this you girl who I was instantly terrified by.
“Gracie who are the monsters?” I demanded.
She said nothing. She only stared at the far corner of the room at some apparition I was blind to.
“Who told you to do it?” I finally asked.
She slowly spun around with a blank face and finally responded to my inquisition, “I always listen to my mommy and daddy.
From the moment Lucy Winer was admitted to Kings Park on June 21, 1967, following several unsuccessful suicide attempts, she experienced firsthand the horrors of mental institutions during this time period in America. As Lucy stepped into Ward 210, the female violent ward of Building 21, she was forced to strip naked at the front desk, symbolizing how patient’s personhood status was stripped from them as soon as they arrived into these institutions. During her second day at Kings Park, Lucy started crying and another patient informed her not to cry because “they’ll hurt her”. This instance, paired with the complete lack of regulations, instilled a fear in Lucy that anyone at this institution could do anything to her without any punishment, which had haunted her throughout her entire stay at Kings Park. Dr. Jeanne Schultz was one of the first psychiatrists to examine Lucy and diagnosed her with chronic differentiated schizophrenia. In an interview with Dr. Schultz decades later, Lucy found out that many patients were
This environment serves not as an inspiration for mental health but as an element of repression. The locked door and barred windows serve to physically restrain her: “the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.” The narrator is affected not only by the physical restraints but also by being exposed to the room’s yellow wallpaper is dreadful and fosters only negative creativity. “It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide – plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.”
She bore in her arms a child, a baby of some three months old, who winked and turned aside its little face from the too vivid light of day; because its experience, heretofore, had brought it acquainted only with the gray twilight of a dungeon, or other darksome apartment of the prison (49).
The setting of this story is described as an old nursery that is located on the top floor of an old isolated mansion that is several miles off of the main road. The narrator’s treatment is “prescribed” by her husband, John, who orders her to stay in bed and separate herself from the outside world in a bedroom that previously had several different identities. “It was a nursery first, and then a playroom and gymnasium, I should judge, for all the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the wall”(730). The feeling the room creates around her slowly begins to alter her mindset. The barred windows create the sense of being trapped within the walls around her which slowly starts to transform the room into the identity of not just any prison, but the narrator’s prison.
The new asylums. Dir. Miri Navasky. Perf. Sigmon Clark, Fred Cohen. WGBH Educational Foundation: 2005. Film.
Within the thin exterior of the cold dark building she called home, she wanted to keep the bodies of those in which she felt she had a connection. Whether it be a reasonable connection or not, she didn’t want to be alone. Her connection with her father brought her to keeping his corps in the house as well as the other man. Her distance from other people around her only drove her to madness causing nothing but isolation and a craving for any type of relation she could hold or be close
Dwyer, Ellen. Homes for the Mad: Life Inside Two Nineteenth Century Asylums. Rutgers University Press. New Brunswick: 1987.
The next most pivotal stage in Susanna Kaysen’s hero’s journey is the call to adventure. This is when she first admits herself into McLean mental hospital. This introduction to a new world and and environment is a transition that is not easy for Susanna. Ultimately, the choice was hers to enroll to the mental hospital, but she was heavily encouraged by her psychologist to go. “‘I’ve got a bed for you,’ he said. “It’ll be a rest. Just for a couple weeks, okay?’” (Kaysen 8). Susanna agrees to go at the end of the week, on Friday, but he immediately he snaps back with “No. You go now,” (8). The
“I was so surprised! I couldn’t believe it was actually him. A rush of adrenaline went through my body. Along with being in shock, I felt some sort of relief and happiness.”
If I was lucky, I’d fall asleep from the pain. I vaguely remembered something to do with hot irons, scalpels, electric shocks, blades, pliers, and lots of blood. At that point, I was scarred literally everywhere. Big, red, infected scars. I wanted them to kill me. I wanted it to be over with. I’d learned my lesson. Society tells people to fit in for a reason. Every town, no matter how big or small, has an Asylum. It looks like a normal house, like one you’d find in the suburbs. It looks like no one’s home, with the little lace curtains drawn shut. It looks like somewhere safe to spend the night. It draws you in, and once you go in, you don’t go back
Jasmine Beckford’s case is the oldest out of the three; in 1984 Jasmine died as a result of long-term abuse aged 4. In 1981 her and her younger sister suffered serious injuries and were paced with foster carers for six months. After this they were allowed back home with their mother on a trial basis as social services were meant to support them. During the last ten months of Jasmine’s life she was only seen once by social workers (Corby, 2006).
...centrates more on the patients daily lives rather then what the asylum does to the women, how she hid the women’s real names, and the fact that her work did not really effect the women’s lives to a great extent. But she nonetheless showed us a world unseen to many. She revealed disturbing practices done at the asylum. Her photos essentially became documents of Ward 81 that no longer exists. Mark’s “intimate glimpse of life in confinement turned out to be affecting,” she changed the way some viewed the mentally ill, and the asylum. And they untimely had an effect of the shutting down of Ward 81 in November of 1977 (Jacobs). Many articles and essays about Ward 81 usually reference Mark’s work as documentary (Fulton). Even though Mark strived for Art, she also left a documentary footprint in history. Ward 81 ultimately must be viewed as both artistic and documentary.
She opened her mouth, but then to my surprise closed it quickly again and stomped back up the stairs to her room.
Now being a thirteen-year-old girl who just called her mother the worst human being in the world, I wasn’t expecting that to come from her. When just moments before I’d been hiding in the hotel’s bathroom, thinking of every little scenario that could play out as my punishment. The ideas being as simple as my father yelling at me, others of me being grounded, or the bigger picture of them, hating me. So when they got Jacky, my sister, to usher me out of my sanctuary, I was plain terrified because of the habits I did even before then.