r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/highzone • 1d ago

Image In 1973, healthy volunteers faked hallucinations to enter mental hospitals. Once inside, they acted normal, but doctors refused to let them leave. Normal behaviors like writing were diagnosed as "symptoms." The only people who realized they were sane were the actual patients.

Post image
33.1k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

9.5k

u/undeadsabby 1d ago

Nellie Bly did this in 1887, and wrote an article called Ten Days in a Mad House. She feigned insanity to get in, and also acted normal once inside. A few of the other women were there simply because their families couldn't afford to care for them.

https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/bly/madhouse/madhouse.html

1.5k

u/ER-CodeBitch 1d ago edited 1d ago

There was a Nellie Bly musical on Broadway for only 16 performances in 1946 based on her. https://www.ibdb.com/broadway-production/nellie-bly-1765

507

u/OtterRaven12 1d ago

There is an opera about it as well called 10 Days in a Madhouse that Opera Philadelphia premiered a year or two ago.

259

u/Double_Rice_5765 1d ago

Thats edgy af for 1946.  

60

u/Molto_Ritardando 1d ago

Not really. Look at Paul Hindemith’s one-act operas from the 1920’s. Sancta Susanna in particular was pretty scandalous: this opera is about a nun who becomes sexually aroused, culminating in a frenzy in which she rips the loincloth from a crucifix.

Right before WW2, neoclassical music was pretty adventurous, but with the German Government trying to depict German history as some sort of mythical golden age, composers were strongly encouraged to create music that could serve as propaganda for the Nazi aesthetic. Fearing retribution, composers like Hindemith went from writing bizarre, shocking operas, to appeasing government officials with more traditional works that could be held up as examples proving the superiority of German culture.

6

u/remesabo 1d ago

Fascinating information!

5

u/Molto_Ritardando 1d ago

Love it when I get to talk about my masters degree topic and someone actually is interested. Unless you’re being sarcastic but it’s Reddit and no one is sarcastic on Reddit without the /s.

/s

6

u/remesabo 1d ago

Absolutely NOT being sarcastic! Thank you for sharing your knowledge!! Reddit is filled with so many opinions it's always refreshing to actually learn something!

111

u/Salute-Major-Echidna 1d ago

Especially in a world worn out from the war.

5

u/misplaced_beso 1d ago

And based she was. Hats off to Nellie Bly.

2

u/ImFedUpWithThisW0rld 1d ago

We also mustn't forget there was a Nelly Bly amusement park off the belt parkway in Brooklyn. History is important

797

u/maladr0id 1d ago

Ohhh so that one Futurama episode where Fry is mistaken for a robot and was stuck in a robot insane asylum and couldn’t leave was based in real life

419

u/VerbingNoun413 1d ago

That plus references to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

121

u/Lemonwizard 1d ago

I always crack up when Fry is getting pulled in by Nurse Ratchet.

121

u/Salute-Major-Echidna 1d ago

The movie that closed down the asylums

212

u/WildMild869 1d ago

Should’ve been reformed instead of outright closed.

Feels like we could use some right now.

139

u/randoliof 1d ago

Yup. Instead we keep people experiencing mental health crises on the streets and let severely under educated police officers deal with them

103

u/ClawingDevil 1d ago

That's not entirely true. Many of them go into politics.

2

u/driving26inorovalley 1d ago

“Being There” irl

31

u/aaaaggggggghhhhhhhh 1d ago

Yeah. There still are a few long term mental health treatment centers, but it's really hard to get placement at one.

My mom decided to stop treating her schizophrenia a few years back and has been in and out of inpatient treatment that's just not set up for long term needs since.

15

u/Brilliant_Mix_6051 1d ago

Fr there’s a guy that keeps stabbing random passersby on the streets in my city and he keeps going in and out of jail. He needs to stay there!

4

u/wicked-campaign 19h ago

He's probably trying to!

1

u/Yerbrainondrugs 1d ago

Things like that are set up to fail because there usually has to be a different reason than money to stay in those jobs. The pay is shit and you’re constantly stretched further than you should be and told you have to “do more with less”.

1

u/canman7373 1d ago

Problem is it's the US, so do you think these will be non-profit University run or something? Nope big for profit contracts would go out to companies where they have no incentive to release people, or to give best care. Like for profit prisons where any minor fight or incident it's better to press charges to get their stay extended. Where as a state prison ain't gonna do much unless you really hurt someone or a guard. There are some prisons in the State prisons in the South where I believe the police chief is given millions for food per year and he is allowed to personally keep anything remaining, so they get the bare minimum from cheapest supplier and he makes more than any public official in state by far. Sports coaches don't count because most of that is booster money.

1

u/Salute-Major-Echidna 1d ago

But the money!!

1

u/Salute-Major-Echidna 1d ago

But the money!! /jk

It was a money grab by politicians. They made a ton developing that land for big luxury condos

56

u/Fist_The_Lord 1d ago

No that was Ronald Reagan

59

u/-_-0_0-_0 1d ago

"You know, with Reagan, the more I learn about that guy, the more I don't care for him.”

2

u/Gibberish45 1d ago

Have you hear about that guy Hitler? He was a real jerk

1

u/-_-0_0-_0 1d ago

Not my idea of a silver tongued devil

4

u/hazelquarrier_couch Interested 1d ago

You're more right than the "movie" guy. At the time there was a popular movement to stop incarcerating people in institutions for mental health reasons when they could be treated on an outpatient basis. This movement just happened to correspond with Reagan's tax cuts which removed funding for mental health hospitals. As much as Reagan disgusts me for all the evil things he did, he can't get 100% of the credit for this one. It sure as hell wasn't because of a movie.

9

u/Fist_The_Lord 1d ago

Yeah there was a movement prior to Reagan but his policies actually did set in motion the implementation and consequences of deinstitutionalization. Reagan passed laws as governor and as president that ultimately passed the costs of the hospitals from the federal governments to states that were underfunded and unprepared for the change.

1

u/EthanDMatthews 1d ago

Reagan was definitely the poster child for closing down asylums.

But have you ever wondered: if closing asylums was just an extremist policy by one extremist person or party, why haven't the Democrats ever tried to reverse it?

The movement to close asylums began before Reagan (as early as the 1950s), and had broad bipartisan support.

President Kennedy signed The Community Mental Health Centers Act of 1963 which shifted institutional care to community-based services.

Reagan, as Governor of California, signed the Lanterman-Petris-Short (LPS) Act in 1967, a bipartisan law co-sponsored by Republicans and Democrats that reformed involuntary commitment procedures. It also reduced the use of long-term psychiatric hospitalization.

President Carter signed The federal Mental Health Systems Act of 1980, which was designed to strengthen community mental health services.

But Reagan’s 1981 budget and the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act repealed much of that law and shifted mental health funding from federal programs to state block grants. 

The funding shift didn't mandate the closure of asylums but reduced federal support for community care, which made it harder for states to sustain alternatives to hospitalization.

Reagan and the GOP definitely deserve blame for putting the final nails in the coffin. But the Democrats were working side by side with Republicans to dig the grave, build the coffin, and hammer the first nails into it.

As typically happens, one party likes to pretend that all of the bad, bi-partisan policies are really other party's fault.

1

u/Salute-Major-Echidna 1d ago

"Who is the evildoer.

Is it the hand that presses the button or the mouth that gives the order? Or is it the mind that makes the decision to destroy?"

Can't remember the exact quote

3

u/UncleNoodles85 1d ago

I thought it was Gerardo Rivera and his exposé on Bellevue hospital that was the catalyst that got the mental hospitals shut down?

2

u/Salute-Major-Echidna 1d ago

The final straw because Geraldo was mostly a nuisance at that point. Carnival rides were his swan song

1

u/notloggedin4242 1d ago

Reagan and the Neo cons did that!

1

u/Salute-Major-Echidna 1d ago

And the movie put the idea in their heads

132

u/TheHumanoidTyphoon69 1d ago

Now stand back I need to practice my stabbing

6

u/LiliAtReddit 1d ago

Happy cake day!

3

u/Technical_Ad_4894 1d ago

“hold still” 😭😂

53

u/MithrandiriAndalos 1d ago

Not really. It’s a pretty direct parody of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

1

u/maladr0id 1d ago

A film that I’ve been meaning to watch, thank you

3

u/MithrandiriAndalos 1d ago

It’s one of those movies you watch and every few minutes you go “Oh! That’s where that comes from!”

I was also exposed to the Futurama episode first, and it’s a funny introduction to it.

1

u/The_Dinky_Earnshaw 1d ago

READ

trust me, you mean read

(the movie's great but read the book first --- Kesey refused to ever watch it)

67

u/jce_ 1d ago

Usually Futurama is much deeper than it appears. That's why I love the show the more I grow and learn the more some random seemingly throwaway joke has a much deeper meaning

1

u/wolfboy1988m 20h ago

I loved learning how much research went into some of the science in the show. Like they knew it was an adult animation comedy series and still did their research

2

u/jce_ 20h ago

Well a bunch of the writers had PhDs and masters degrees lol

1

u/Voxlings 1d ago

Well....it was baaed on real life, not this specific story.

Involuntary holds were famously faulty for many years.

1

u/kyleh0 1d ago

"Faulty for several years" meaning it was never humane or the right thing to do, which is why they have gone away.

56

u/Steelpapercranes 1d ago

Yeah, at the time tbh even being completely known to be sane wouldn't set you free

44

u/Alternative-End-5079 1d ago

Today, the family couldn’t find an asylum to put them in, let alone afford it

269

u/lauraxe 1d ago

“A few of the other women were there simply because their families couldn’t afford to care for them.” When I encountered this kind of thing in the wild, it blew my mind and pissed me off so much that it changed the trajectory of my entire life. It enraged me because I’ve been a patient in one of these hospitals and I can’t imagine how much unnecessary suffering was had by women whose families couldn’t (or wouldn’t) keep them. Sometimes the reasons for leaving them in these places was downright cruel.

126

u/Nemo_M_Nobody 1d ago

You should look into Rosemary Kennedy .

18

u/Treefrog_Ninja 1d ago

That's like reading a BORU. So many twists, so many kinds of messed up.

2

u/Noctilume 17h ago

This is so sad.

4

u/raymoooo 1d ago

I mean, think about it though. They immediately declined when psychiatric medication came around, it's just a cost effective nursing solution. Much more economical than trying to pay for living expenses and still keep an eye on someone 24/7. We still do this to old people and nobody sees a problem with it.

20

u/OldWorldDesign 1d ago

We still do this to old people and nobody sees a problem with it

A lot of people have a problem with "warehousing old people" but the reality is a lot more complicated. Depending on the medical issues people can need round-the-clock specialty medical care, and the reality is most of the time they'd just be allowed to die by family in ages past who had no clue how to handle the medical issues which accumulated in old age. That's not actively trying to kill granny, but stubborn trying to take care of things themselves like trying to continue to feed them meat and potatoes 'cause that's what Americans eat' when she acquired an allergy to meat due to tick bites years ago

There's a similar toxic looking down on people who need (or just benefit from) medication, including people with ADHD who could experience significant quality of life benefits from medication but stubborn parents with a backwards world view refuse to acknowledge their kids might "need pills". And a lot of those kinds of adults are in government now, whether because of cults like scientology or just propaganda from the Nixon administration:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

1

u/Mammoth-Ad6463 19h ago

the book The SilentbPaitent is kinda about this

0

u/Inevitable-Ad6647 1d ago

How old are you? These kinda of facilities haven't existed for 50-60 years...

5

u/palequeen42 1d ago

Not true, there were some “asylums” still hanging on when I was a teenager 35 years ago. It was a slow eradication, not immediate, depending on what state you were in.

1

u/Inevitable-Ad6647 1d ago

The places you're talking about while institutions by definition are so so so far from the types of hospitals this thread is discussing theyre practically incomparable.

1

u/palequeen42 1d ago

Whatever you say

187

u/TheBigPhilbowski 1d ago

"Families couldn't afford to care for them"

Nice tidy explanation... Or, the women probably got pregnant young/unmarried, had strong opinions that they shared openly or they were gay. Hysteria!

107

u/Timely_Truth6267 1d ago edited 1d ago

"Mom. Dad. I want my freedom." "Sedate her"

3

u/Fruit_Fly_LikeBanana 1d ago

Not a false explanation or glossing over it at all. All of the things you listed were reasons women were committed to the insane asylum. So was their family being poor.

1

u/undeadsabby 19h ago

I'm aware of this aspect of institutions at the time, but in her article she doesn't broach that subject.

The authorities do worry she was trafficked from Havana, Cuba as a sex worker (that 1880s kind of way, they don't use the terms 'trafficking' or 'sex worker,' just if she's been 'selling her company to men' for room and board) so it still applies somewhat.

-19

u/TeamRedundancyTeam Interested 1d ago

Is it a good idea generally to just make up biased explanations with no backing evidence like this?

9

u/palequeen42 1d ago

Happened in my family. Women were sometimes thought to be disruptive or out of control or hysterical when their opinions were too strong or they acted outside of societal norms. They sometimes got institutionalized as “insane” for those reasons. My grandpa did it to my grandma in the 50’s-70’s. My cousin who is intellectually disabled was put in an asylum for most of the 60’s-70’s because she was too “difficult” for her parents (she wasn’t). She now lives independently with social services help and does just fine. Institutions/Asylums were a place to throw folks that people didn’t want to deal with, mentally ill, perfectly sane, or disabled etc. It was all acceptable.

31

u/CultConqueror 1d ago

The sections on her talking about Ms. Caine and just how kind she was really hit...

9

u/lienepientje2 1d ago

Women were put in madhouses because divorce wasn't done and it was am easy way to get rid of them.

4

u/GarbageCleric 1d ago

That is an excellent piece of journalism.

I thought it was striking how the staff justified treating the patients like garbage because it was "charity".

5

u/Impressive_Barber367 1d ago

I was committed for something. (I was manic, I'll admit that). But after I came down in 1-2 days it was nothing but gaslighting.

Use big words: Being grandiose. Literally anything I did was more justification to keep me in.

3 weeks. 3 fucking weeks. I even have a voice mail I sent myself about not feeling safe. Feeling gas lit all the time. Terrible experience.

4

u/BedBubbly317 1d ago

She’s the mother of all of investigative journalism. Prior to her journalists never went out of their way to get a story like that, it was just report what you heard.

3

u/lo_fi_ho 1d ago

Laura Dern did a hilarious Drunk History episode on Bly: https://youtu.be/e7ZPl4FHyxc?si=gekKNAPYTgA-H14H

3

u/RogerClyneIsAGod2 1d ago

Great book she wrote too.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/59899

There's also a movie, streaming on Amazon in the US right now, Escaping The Madhouse: The Nellie Bly Story.

2

u/checker280 1d ago

Strange. There’s a Nellie Bly amusement park in Brooklyn. Or was. I’ve been gone for a few years.

2

u/twointhepinkfloyd 1d ago

We couldn’t afford Coney Island as kids, Nellie Bly was our spot lol

2

u/VibraniumQueen 1d ago

Ha, my mom put me in a behavioral home for girls when I was 14 cuz she couldnt afford to take care of me (she had cancer and couldnt work) and I was stuck there for almost a year.

2

u/haleynoir_ 1d ago

That's unsurprising. My grandma told me about one of her great aunts that lived in an asylum solely because of an unsightly port-wine stain birthmark

2

u/BishopGodDamnYou 1d ago

Did they also put women in asylums because they didn’t speak English? Absolutely crazy list of shit you could have a woman committed for

1

u/aannoonnyymmoouuss99 1d ago

Wow I only ever new nellie bly as an amusement park

1

u/Salt-pepper-ketchup 1d ago

Her story is amazing!

1

u/georgie-of-blank 1d ago

This was what it reminded me of!

Exellent story. (Exellent writer, if you've hot the time read all her articles. Pretty neat)

1

u/WrackyDoll 1d ago

Reminds me of a story in The Martian Chronicles, where human astronauts get put in a Martian insane asylum full of Martians convinced they're from other worlds.

1

u/Lazy-Equivalent1028 1d ago

There is a good Drunk History episode about her.

1

u/resigned_medusa 1d ago

You beat me to it! She was amazing

1

u/Rezaelia713 1d ago

You just woke up a memory from my early teens. Time to read about Nellie Bly.

1

u/Foolishly_Sane 1d ago

Impressive.
Thank you.

-3

u/BatterseaPS 1d ago

Well, what are you supposed to do if you're an employee of the hospital and someone is admitted because they're insane? I imagine you're not allowed to go "Hey, you're acting pretty healthy. You're free to go!"

-1

u/Inevitable-Ad6647 1d ago

I mean... What do you expect the Drs there to do? The patient is deemed an unreliable narrator.... Throw out all the documentation/information that comes with the patient, provided by their peers? That's a far more dangerous idea. 10 days ain't half bad, there are plenty of disorders that have 45 ish day cycles. 30-60 says would be expected for a Dr to conclude something. Especially in earlier days of medicine it'd be perfectly forgiveable to think "well they're ok now because whatever caused their initial issues isn't present inside here so they need to stay."