christopher payne - asylum : inside the closed world of state mental hospitals

While it may be true that many of these institutions now lay empty what is also true is that the restraints of straps and walls is now replaces by drugs. when Sargent pioneered the use of thorazine here and Freeman and Watts, the lobotomy.

Now we have millions of people, young and old, even fetal who have been place on psychoactive drugs. There was a time when few were on these drugs but on any given day 20-30 per cent of the people I see are on these drugs. No one counsels them they just write prescriptions for drugs to numb one to what bothers them. Perhaps someday soon we will see not vacant institutions but vacant eyes..

zenondudasculpture.com   11.23.09

The comment above is more touching or shocking than the photographs. Dehumanization has a very different face nowadays...

anna   11.24.09

i would recommend a great book from thomas szasz, 'mental illness as myth', published in 1961. makes one think!

This is szasz.com


"Perhaps most radically ... Thomas Szasz deemed mental illness a mythic and monstrous beast,
and proclaimed that 'mental illness' was a fiction. Insanity, he has continued ever since
to claim, is not a real disease, whose nature has been progressively scientifically unveiled;
mental illness is rather a myth, forged by psychiatrists for their own greater glory.
Over the centuries, medical men and their supporters have been involved, argues Szasz,
in a self-serving 'manufacture of madness.' In this, he indicts both the pretensions of
organic psychiatry and the psychodynamic followers of Freud, whose notion of the
'unconscious' in effect breathed new life into the obsolete metaphysical Cartesian dualism.
For Szasz, any expectation of finding the etiology of mental illness in body or mind --
above all in some mental underworld -- must be a lost cause, a dead-end, a linguistic error,
and even an exercise in bad faith. 'Mental illness' or the 'unconscious' are not realities
but at best metaphors. In promoting such ideas, psychiatrists have either been involved in
improper cognitive imperialism or have rather naively pictorialized the psyche -- reifying
the fictive substance behind the substantive. Properly speaking, contends Szasz, insanity
is not a disease with origins to be excavated, but a behavior with meanings to be decoded.
Social existence is a rule-governed game-playing ritual in which the mad person bends the
rules and exploits the loopholes. Since the mad person is engaged in social performances
that obey certain expectations so as to defy others, the pertinent questions are not about
the origins, but about the conventions, of insanity. In this light, Szasz dismisses
traditional approaches to the history of madness, as questions mal posés, and aims to
reformulate them." --From: Porter, R., Introduction, in Porter, R. and Wright, D., eds.,The
Confinement of the Insane: International Perspectives, 1800-1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003); pp. 1-19; p. 2.

KJG   11.27.09