I just finished a recent release that is fiction, I don't want to mention the title because I don't want to give away spoilers. But it realistically portrayed how women and mental illness were treated in the mid-century modern time period. I'd like to continue with this theme, because we're in spooky season and what's scarier than not having autonomy with something as permanent as a lobotomy?
I've already experienced Girl, Interrupted and didn't like it. What I read had Shudder Island vibes just not as severe hallucinations, but still being in a mental hospital against one's will.
Thank you for your suggestions. 🙂
by Deckled_Owl_1
4 Comments
Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter by Kate Clifford Larson is excellent and very well-researched. It’s horrifying what happened to her.
The nonfiction history book “The Woman’s House of Detention” by Hugh Ryan is a good history of an institution that similarly preyed on lower class women, though the jail used thorazine to incapacitate women rather than surgery. A couple of the women incarcerated there were political activists who later called out the city for using antipsychotics to sedate prisoners to keep them dumb and compliant, rather than because they actually benefitted medically.
Breanne Fahs is an academic who specializes in manifestos, and has a good biography of Valerie Solanas called “Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (And Shot Andy Warhol)”. Solanas is an interesting one, because she *was* mentally ill, and you can see how her psychiatric incarceration was really just another way of sweeping unpleasant things away from public attention without dealing with them. Her trial also set off some interesting schisms in women’s lib activism, when Ti-Grace Atkinson argued that NOW should support Solanas *because* she was sent to a sanitarium instead of a prison. Kind of a good book for understanding why legitimately mentally ill people might pull away to the fringes and mistrust attempts to ‘help’ them reintegrate into mainstream society.
Nightmare in Pink by John D. MacDonald
Earlier than you asked but Nelli Bly, Ten Days in a Madhouse. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. FYI if you want a visual the movie was shot at a closed facility