Friday, April 20 Creative Writing Exercise and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Introduction Part 2: Mental Hospitals

CREATIVE WRITING EXERCISE Writing Prompt: Write your own poem in the style of the Beats. Your subject matter will be something you don’t like about school and/or being a teenager in 2018. Guidelines: Your poem must be written in first-person and use some form of repetition. Your poem must also include in some way the object your group has been given. Your poem should also be written with oral performance in mind (whether or not you actually choose to perform it).

Closing: PARODIES OF “BEATNIK POETRY” Beat Poetry has been ripe for satire and parody almost from the moment it became popular in the late 1950s. Many of the cliches people associate with poetry (and especially poetry readings) can, for better or for worse, be traced back to the Beats. Here, Mike Myers does his own version of a Beat poem in the 1993 movie So I Married an Axe Murderer.

Mental Hospitals in the 1930s-1960s

By today’s standards, conditions in mental hospitals were unimaginable overcrowded dirty understaffed

Inside the Institution Patients provided with “adequate care” and often segregated. Patients usually given uniforms and daily “chores.” (It wasn’t unit 1973 that New York state banned public hospitals from requiring patients to work in exchange for room and board.) Families often ashamed of patients (sometimes denying their existence). Ultimately, some hospitals became holding areas for a person’s entire life.

Medical Care in Mental Hospitals Deaths and injuries sometimes resulted in both appropriate and inappropriate treatments. Patients treated with medically approved and non-medically approved procedures: Put in tanks of ice-cold water Spun in chairs for hours Forced to take “medications” (powerful psychoactive drugs) Placed in seclusion or in restraints

Types of Treatments for the Mentally Ill Group therapy Drug therapy Electroshock therapy Lobotomy

Drug Therapy Thorazine: first psychotropic drug made it possible to calm unruly behavior, anxiety, agitation, and confusion without using physical restraints Chlorpromazine: used to treat schizophrenic or manic depressive disorder

Electroshock/Electroconvulsive Therapy Medical treatment for severe mental illness in which a small amount of electricity is introduced to the brain. Became very popular in the 1930s and 40s Originated to control negative behaviors in animals but doctor noticed that patients were more “normal” after having seizure Was cruelly used as control device in most wards Still used today to treat some forms of severe depression

Lobotomy Surgical procedure severing nerve pathways in frontal lobes of the brain Often used as a last resort for patients whose behavioral patterns were not improved by other forms of treatment Between 1939-1955, over 100,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States Aim was that “the patient might be transformed from a disturbed to a quiet clement [insane person].” There was no intention to “help” the patient; goal was only to eradicate the behavior which others found undesirable.

LET THERE BE LIGHT (1946) Many of the patients Kesey encountered working at the Menlo Park hospital were likely WWII veterans. Vets returning from overseas often suffered from what we would now call undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder and other related psychological conditions, as vividly and heartbreakingly depicted in this clip from the 1946 U.S. Army film Let There Be Light, directed by the famous Hollywood director John Huston.. This film was considered so shocking that it was suppressed by the Army and not shown to the general public until the 1980s. In 2010 it was selected for preservation at the United States National Film Registry at the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

Clip from Let There Be Light

“Deinstitutionalization revolution” of the mid 1960s Radical deinstitutionalization revolution begins Supposed to end cruel and inadequate care of institutions Individuals would live in their communities and have a “normalized” life Group homes, residential care facilities, and rooming houses were developed Movement helped break up control that was happening in hospitals Number of institutionalized mentally ill people in the U.S. drops from 560,000 to 130,000 by 1980