Bedlam House: Difference between revisions

[[File:Batman-Arkham-Asylum-Impressions-1.jpg|link=Batman: Arkham Asylum|thumb|400px|Makes you long for the good old days of [[Hollywood Exorcism|exorcisms]], doesn't it?]]

 

 

 

 

Modern psychological techniques [[There Are No Therapists|do not exist]]. Electroshock therapy is handed out like lollipops at the doctor's office. Those padded walls haven't been scrubbed in weeks (even if they had been, the inmates would just keep [[Room Full of Crazy|writing on them]]). Abandon all hope, ye who enter Bedlam House!

 

 

''Bethlem Royal'' is still active, albeit having undergone multiple relocations, and is now, according to [[Wikipedia]], ''[[The Atoner|at the forefront of humane psychiatric treatment]]''.

 

 

Has nothing to do with [[Coraline (novel)|the Beldam]].

 

== Comic Books ==

* [[Batman]]'s Arkham Asylum. Whenever shown it is a dark, dank, brickwalled facility, run by burly nurses and [[Mad Doctor|mad doctors]]. Probably because whoever's funding the place is more concerned with keeping the inmates ''in'' than making them ''sane''. [[Cardboard Prison|Not that that works, either]].

** Pre-Crisis, it was established canon that Arkham's own founder himself went crazy and was bound into his own institution, [[Driven to Suicide|until he died]]. Don't worry, he kept himself occupied in the meantime by etching gibberish into his cell's walls with his fingernails while humming "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." The current canon of this, and the items immediately below, isn't especially clear.

*** In one version his parents were both killed by crazies, he thought that he could cure the killer, the killer seems cured but kills his secretary in front of his eyes, then pleads for pity. Arkham decides that only discipline works against the "filth", that is revealed to not help with the super criminals either, so he starts murdering them.

** One [[Elseworld]], ''The Batman of Arkham'', had Bruce Wayne as a psychiatrist in an early 20th century Arkham... where, in a surprising subversion, he genuinely helps people; The story opens with a breakthrough therapy session with Killer Croc, who is nearly totally rehabilitated because Dr. Wayne simply treated him like a human being instead of chaining him like an animal. Later, Wayne says that before he came, Arkham was indeed "the old Bedlam." But, under the later direction of Dr. Crane, it reverts to the old ways immediately. Things got better.

** Another mini, ''[[Arkham Asylum: Living Hell]]'', had it show that even when a ''sane'' person goes in, there's little hope he comes out the [[Just for Pun|sane]]. This mini also showed us a side of Arkham rarely seen before, exploring the patients who were committed and never escaped but stayed as lunatic as can be, from ghastly cult leader Death Rattle to [[Mad Artist]] Doodlebug.

** Showing how concentration camps are not so fun than they used to be.

* In another Mel Brooks film, ''[[High Anxiety]]'', the main character works at the Psychoneurotic Institute for the Very, VERY Nervous, which is less interested in curing its rich clientele than in keeping them indefinitely and thus getting more of their money.

** Its even more so on the book, with a prime example being Max Taber. Mr Taber was a man there who was alright until he asked what was in his medication. They sent him to shock therapy for this and is soon after lobotomized and released as a completely different person. Ironically, the nurse who treats patients on the Disturbed Ward is a kind little Japanese lady who openly resents Nurse Ratched and her methods.

* The Channard Institute (where the most insane patients are kept ''in the steam tunnels'') in ''[[Hellbound Hellraiser II]]''.

** Possibly [[Truth in Television]] as during the very early 20th century, electricity was still seen as a magical force with properties that included curing the sick. It was considered the spark of life and at least one author had written a book about it [[Frankenstein|doing just that]].

* ''[[Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (film)|Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street]]'': Todd's daughter Johanna is sent to Fogg's Asylum, a notorious madhouse, by Judge Turpin, who is furious that she won't go along with his [[Wife Husbandry]] and plans to elope with Anthony. She's lucky she didn't have to spend too much time there.

* The [[Boris Karloff]] film ''Bedlam'' was a fictionalized account of the atrocities that occurred at the infamous Bethlehem Royal Hospital for the mentally ill.

* In the ''[[House on Haunted Hill]]'' remake, the house was evil specifically because {{spoiler|the doctors were evil, the patients took over, raped and killed them, and then the house was set on fire.}}

* See the documentary ''Titicut Follies'' for a horrifying glimpse of this in the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane at Bridgewater, MA, in the 1960s. The documentary was banned for many years, by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The overt reason was that the film invaded the privacy of the inmates, but the real reason was to keep the horrors from the public.

* The insane asylum in the opening of ''[[Amadeus]]'' appears to be such a beast for the non-wealthy inmates. It is much friendlier and more comfortable for the aged composer Antonio Salieri. It doesn't hurt he's suffered [[Sanity Slippage]] and resides in private quarters available to the rich.

* ''[[Shutter Island]]'': {{spoiler|Subverted in the [[Twist Ending]], as the horrific experiments are all part of the protagonist's delusions.... Maybe. The story plays with the audience, as it is because of familiarity with the trope that one so readily accepts Daniels' version of reality as truth.}}

* Westin Hills from the ''[[A Nightmare on Elm Street]]'' series. The place was originally decrepit, with the most insane patients being kept together in a giant pit. The facility was closed for an unknown amount of time after the volunteering Sister Mary Helena (aka Amanda Krueger) became trapped in the aforementioned pit (where she was raped and tortured for days) due to staff incompetence.

 

== Literature ==

* Arkham Asylum was named after [[H.P. Lovecraft|H.P. Lovecraft's]] [[Lovecraft Country|fictional Massachusetts town]], whose Arkham Sanitarium is a popular destination for his less-fortunate characters. It is itself a subversion of this trope, making its namesake look like a magical fairyland filled with tiny psychiatrists flitting about on butterfly wings.

* Subverted in the [[Ben Elton]] novel ''Dead Famous.'' One of the contestants on a [[Reality TV Show]] tries to curry favor by talking about the time she spent in this kind of insane asylum when she was younger; one of the other contestants knows immediately that she's lying, because her mother is actually institutionalized.

* THE Bedlam is referenced in Dickens' ''[[A Christmas Carol]]'' - as Scrooge observes his nephew and Cratchit's happiness over Christmas he grumbles "I'll retire to Bedlam."

* Clifford Beers wrote ''A Mind That Found Itself'', which related his own experiences in an early 20th century string of Connecticut asylums and kickstarted the Mental Hygiene movement. The author was suffering from genuine delusions and depression, was cured when he was convinced by a sensitive act on his brother's part, but was still driven to an opposite extreme by the revelation he had been wrong. It took him a year after his recovery from the delusions to be finally released.

* In ''[[Diary of a Madman]]'' the eponymous madman Poprishchin eventually winds up in one.

* The actual Bedlam asylum is a major part of the plot of ''[[Gemma Doyle|Rebel Angels]]''.

* An early two-parter on ''[[Alias (TV series)|Alias]]'', "Reckoning"/"Color Blind," sent Sydney to one such asylum in Romania [read: [[Ruritania]]]. It turned out to be run by an agent for recurring nemesis K-Directorate, and she ended up under interrogation with shock therapy as [[Electric Torture]].

* The ''[[Doctor Who]] episode'' "The Shakespeare Code" featured the historical Bethlem Royal Hospital - or Bedlam.

* The ''[[Torchwood]]'' episode "Adrift" has one of these for {{spoiler|victims of [[Magnetic Plot Device|the Rift]] which were brought back to Earth who can't be returned to their families,}} set up by Capt. Jack Harkness. Subverted in that although the buildings are grubby and run down, the staff are actually quite nice.

* In one episode of ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'', Daniel goes insane due to someone's anti-Goa'uld weapon; unaware of the real problem, General Hammond has him sent to an asylum where he is kept in a straitjacket and heavily medicated. Perhaps not terribly awful in the real world - Daniel ''has'' had at least one violent episode - but given the bizarre nature of several adventures the group has already had, Daniel's [[Applied Phlebotinum]] explanations weren't that farfetched.

* German metal band Stormwitch had a song called 'Welcome to Bedlam'.

* King Diamond has written more than a few songs from the point of view of a tormented asylum inmate, including an entire concept album about one escaping and going on a [[Roaring Rampage of Revenge]] against the people [[Through the Eyes of Madness|he thinks]] were responsible for putting him away.

** The follow-up songs "Auksjon (i Dieter Meyers hall)" ("Auction (in Dieter Meyer's Hall)") and "Medisin & Psykiatri" ("Medicine & Psychiatry") involves the same man either hallucinating (or performing) the murder of his psychiatrist and escaping with intent of revenge on the people who convinced him to check in the first place.

* [[Disturbed]]'s song "Asylum", though only the music video. The actual song is about a metaphorical asylum, using the dual-meaning behind the word for both "mad house" and "safe haven". In other words, the dark places in the mind become a place of both chaos and security.

{{quote|In a place where long lost souls are led astray

A penny is a cheap price to pay

* The song ''Twisted Mind'' by [[Avantasia]]. Notable because it's one of the few songs to feature [[Kamelot|Roy Khan]] as a guest vocalist. }}

 

 

 

 

* In the horror RPG ''[[Kult]]'', most asylums are hellholes and torture chambers where people only grow more insane. This includes the doctors. {{spoiler|In fact, such asylums tend to work as holes in the [[Weirdness Censor|illusion]] that humanity inhabits; portals to Inferno and other nasty parts of the dark Reality surrounding us.}}

* ''[[New World of Darkness]]'' sourcebook ''Asylum'' describes one of these in detail. The sample asylum has many, ''many'' reasons to be weird by nature (ranging from its proximity to ancient mounds to the religious cult that sprung up on the grounds to the occasional patient riot), and each patient profiled for plot hooks has a [[Multiple Choice Past]] with options ranging from "just plain normal mental illness" to "some really weird shit."

 

== Theater ==

* In ''[[Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (theatre)|Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street]]'', Fogg's Asylum is one of these. Among other things, insane asylums like this back in the day let wigmakers come in and clip the hair of its inmates for their wigs. {{spoiler|Sweeney and Anthony use this as a way for Anthony to get into the madhouse to rescue Johanna.}}

* In the play ''The Insanity of Mary Girard,'' Mary Girard, a sane woman, has been confined to one of these by her husband because she is pregnant by another man's child, and this infidelity is treated as a disease. There's even a device called the Chair, where they strap unruly inmates down, hands and feet, and put a black box over their heads so they can't even see. In the end, {{spoiler|she decides that it's better to live away from her husband and the world outside, even if she does have to be trapped, because if she is obedient she will be treated reasonably well. However, when the tourists come and pay to gawk at the inmates, she will flaunt once and for all that she is [[Madness Mantra|insane... insane... insane...]].}} [[Nightmare Fuel]]? Why, most certainly!

 

** Considering the fact that [[Those Wacky Nazis]] generally exterminated Mental patients outright and handed the remainders to [[Morally-Ambiguous Doctorate|the same group of people who produced Dr. Mengele]] for cruel and terrifying experiments which were obscenely deadly [[For Science!]]!- and this is before we get into the habit of shipping dissidents to said mental asylums when they ran out of the original patients- this is probably justifiable.

** The last third of the campaign level "Ring of Steel" forces you to travel through a bombed out insane asylum that's pretty damn normal compared to other examples on this list. However, no small amount of tension is derived from the fact that there are no Germans to fight until you reach the second floor. As Sergeant Reznov says: "This place reeks of nightmares and madness, but only the insane would stand against us!"

** Although this type of mental institution shouldn't be in any way surprising when one considers that the game takes place in the equivalent of our Dark Ages, where the mentally infirm really were just left to rot in cells.

* In ''Address Unknown'', a [[Show Within a Show]] in ''[[Max Payne 2]]'', the protagonist is sent to an insane asylum that seems to fit this trope. We literally see [[The Theme Park Version]] when Max visits an abandoned fun-house based on the show. Abandoned presumably because a TV series about insanity (whose plot more-or-less parallels Max's own battle with his inner demons throughout the game) doesn't make for a wholesome day out for the family.

* ''[[Silent Hill]]'''s Brookhaven Hospital. Cedar Grove might qualify as well. The fact that the town has two mental hospitals might say something about the relative sanity of its inhabitants.

* Part of ''[[The Suffering]]'' takes place in an [[Abandoned Hospital]] version. The recent supernatural happenings have awakened its twisted doctor as a ghost, manifesting in the form of an image from a movie projector.

*** To be fair, the Cradle itself is merely [[Nothing Is Scarier|terrifying in atmosphere]], while the actual danger comes from the... {{spoiler|''[[Our Zombies Are Different|puppets]]'' }}

* Blackfield Asylum in ''[[Twisted Metal Black]]''. {{spoiler|But then, the whole game is a nightmare, so why not?}}

* ''[[Zork Nemesis]]'' has an [[Abandoned Hospital|abandoned asylum]] as one of its "islands" (to use a ''[[Myst]]'' parallel). As anticipated, there's plenty of muffled screaming and distant clanging metal in the [[Psycho Strings|ambient soundtrack]], blood-stained items and relics implying [[Cold-Blooded Torture|highly experimental]] procedures on patients. Just to pile on the [[Nightmare Fuel]], there is also an [[Ax Crazy]] [[Mad Scientist|electroconvulsive therapy technician]] ({{spoiler|who gives you a [[Electric Torture|mains-current strength shock]], so that you can ''open a door''}}), and a morgue, where you must {{spoiler|find a [[Peek-a-Boo Corpse|naked corpse]] in a metal drawer, [[Losing Your Head|decapitate it]], place the [[Brain In a Jar|head]] onto a machine to reanimate it and [[Guide Dang It|make it say the combination to the lock a safe]]}}. Similarly, {{spoiler|gruesomely retrieving an [[Brain In a Jar|amputated arm and hand]] mounted on a spike in a display case}} is necessary to open an electrified keypad lock. Needless to say, all of this contrasts rather starkly to the jovial tone in previous games in the Zork series.

* In ''[[Eternal Darkness]]'', {{spoiler|Maximillian Roivas gets carted off to one of these at the end of his chapter}}.

* ''[[American McGee's Alice]]'' has an entire section set inside Wonderland's interpretation of a Victorian asylum. It says something that the person in charge is the Mad Hatter, who views the inmates as little more than [[Nightmare Fuel|spare parts]]. {{spoiler|It's revealed at the end of the game that Alice has been in a catatonic state in a real-life asylum throughout, and Wonderland was a subconscious mechanism for her to deal with the deaths of her family in a fire. The title screen and intro sequence make this place look like the archetypal Bedlam, but in line with the entire game being pretty much Alice's perception of reality the ending shows it to be a much more pleasant place.}}

** The sequel, ''[[Alice: Madness Returns]]'', has her being subjected to having holes ''drilled into her skull'', electrotherapy, leaches, tonics and head shaving in one of these places in a cutscene. [[Emilie Autumn]] would probably like these games.

{{quote|'''Doc Brown''' "They'd ship us both off to the loony bin! And trust me, you don't want to see the inside of a 1930's insane asylum!"}}

* ''[[MediEvil (1998 video game)|Medievil]]'' has The Asylum, which is filled with cackling madmen in strait-jackets who want to headbutt you to death.

 

== Web Comics ==

* From the little we've managed to gather, Jonas of ''[[The Phoenix Requiem]]'' has spent far, far more time than he would have liked to in a house such as this one.

* ''[[The Continentals]]'': In the steampunk murder/mystery/adventure "The Continentals", the criminal asylum Timbre Dark Manor is a manmade monument to madness built like a dark castle on the sins of man. [http://www.webcomicsnation.com/moniquem/continentals/series.php/ here].

* The Mercia Sanitarium and Straitjacket Emporium of [[A Loonatics Tale]] is sort of half-this. It's kind of foreboding on the outside, the inside is either stark white or dim and grimy depending on which part of the asylum you're in, and the patients seem semi-neglected because the only staff it appears to have is the staff that's appeared onscreen, so it's more like a detention center for people diagnosed as insane, with occasional bouts of genuinely attempting to cure patients who may or may not be too intimidated by the staff to accept the help. The staff has their own share of psychological issues: The directors used to be a crack therapeutic team (aside from being slightly trigger-happy with lobotomies) but have retired from active practice, and the actual therapists are a tiny idealist with a fragile ego; his old college classmate who is a hateful shrew with misandrist tendencies, a mechanical claw for a left hand, and no bedside manner to speak of; and an equally hateful, slightly pathetic middle-aged man who is ''theoretically'' smart enough and skilled enough to be a decent therapist, but is too apathetic to do anything but cram medication down the patient's throat. The best therapist on staff is the 25-year-old intern, who spends more time running around catching escaped inmates with an oversized butterfly net. And that's ''part of his job description''.

 

* Pretty much all of the scenarios in ''[[The Holders Series]]'' take place in one of these.

* The Chamoix most definitely qualifies.

 

 

== Western Animation ==

** Harely Quinn was also a therapist at Arkham that fell in love with the Joker. It shows the place isn't that great for its staff either.

** The episode ''Lock-Up'', however, features Arkham guard Lyle Bolton, who gets fired after it's revealed he's on a serious power trip that has made him violently abusive to inmates including Harley and Jonathon Crane.

** In the alternate world of ''[[Justice League]]'', Arkham Asylum looks incredibly pleasant both inside and out. Everything's clean, bright and modern... but all the inmates have been lobotomized and lost their humanity.

* ''[[Robot Chicken]]'' sent Calvin of ''[[Calvin and Hobbes]]'' fame to one of these after his murderous rampage. "Mars is amazing...!"

* In the ''[[Futurama]]'' episode "Insane in the Mainframe", Fry is accidentally sent to an insane asylum for ''robots''. Although the treatments seem appropriate for curing insane robots, they drive the all-too-human Fry to madness, leading him to think he's a robot... and thus is considered "cured".

* Wanda/Scarlet Witch in ''[[X-Men: Evolution]]'' was abandoned at one of these by her father, Magneto when she was just a child. As a result, all she can think of after being broken out is getting revenge on him only to have her memories altered by the end.

* The Crazy House for Boys in ''[[Invader Zim]]'' definitely fits this trope, complete with [[Paranoia Fuel|men in white coats rushing into a school, grabbing an 11-year-old kid and throwing him into the back of a padded truck]]. Naturally, [[It Gets Worse]].

 

 

== Real Life ==

** The place, by the way, is named after the judge who allowed them to keep running after "casually" receiving a generous payment from them.

* Conversely, [[Church of Happyology|Scientologists]] believe that ''every'' mental hospital on the planet, without exception, is like this. Their front group, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, is dedicated to "educating" the public about this fact. (And the fact that psychiatrists caused 9/11 and the Holocaust.) Their solution to this is to close them all down and [[Assimilation Plot|replace the entire mental health industry]] with the wonders of [[L. Ron Hubbard]]'s "tech". Horrible as some mental hospitals can be, this is no reason to tear down all therapy everywhere, which is what Scientologists aspire to do.

* Many psychiatric hospitals in Soviet Union were these. Especially ones where they kept dissidents. Some still are.

** Joseph Brodsky's poem ''Gorbunov and Gorchakov'' is about two patients in one of these institutions. But are they madmen or dissidents? Or both?

** The Soviet government considered everyone who disagreed with Communism (i.e. them) to be mentally ill. After all, Communism is the wave of the future, right?

* Many "Teen Treatment" facilities are [http://www.heal-online.org/cedu.htm systematically] [http://www.heal-online.org/wwasp.htm abusive]. The most infamous was Tranquility Bay. They finally closed it down after multiple lawsuits in 2009.

* [[Yellow Peril|China]] has "Video Game Addiction Clinics". The treatment is, pardon the sick irony, like Arkham Asylum. Electroshock? Check. Beatings? You're in China, what do you think? Murder? Of course. Murder for TOUCHING THE DIRECTOR'S CHAIR? [[This Is for Emphasis, Bitch|Of course, ya dumbass!]]

* Due to improperly trained and supervised personnel and [[What Measure Is a Non-Human?]] applying to the patients in the minds of many, abuse is quite rampant at ''many'' mental institutions, and serious injury and death are not uncommon - regardless of the patient's age, the patient's illness, what they ''thought'' the patient's illness was, or what led the personnel to, er, [[No-Holds-Barred Beatdown|use the more severe restraining techniques]]. There's an entire "psychiatric survivors" community of people who barely survived their brush with institutionalization, often with PTSD, brain damage from medications they didn't need, or both. Mind you, a positive experience ''is'' more likely than it was 100 years ago... but that doesn't mean that ''anything'' you've read above is by any means rare, or only limited to countries that are not yours or are considered [[Acceptable Targets]].

** Lack of funding, and cutting out numerous programs, contributes to much of this. Too few staff taking care of too many patients (or whatever the euphemism of the year is) means that things will happen, no matter how enlightened and sympathetic the staff. There's sometimes confusion about whether or not patients can be physically restrained, and fear of punishment keeps staff second-guessing their responses to events. The causes are many, and solutions are complicated.

* [[wikipedia:Nellie Bly|Nellie Bly]] the reporter got herself sent to one of these in order to do an honest expose on the conditions. She took a false identity, convinced people she was insane and was sent to the [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|Woman's Lunatic Asylum]] on Blackwell's island. It turned out to be a cruel place where the inmates were often freezing, due to too little clothing, were abused and teased by the nurses, and were fed incredibly poor food. Nellie also found that there were many other women there who were just as sane as she was, who had been sent there because they were sick, poor or had lost their temper, and now couldn't leave as no one would listen to them. When she finally was able to leave, after 10 days, [http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/bly/madhouse/madhouse.html Nellie published the account of her time in the asylum], causing a major overhaul of the system.

* The [[wikipedia:Crescent Hotel|Crescent Hotel]] in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, used to be one of these. It used to be a treatment center for incurable diseases during the early part of the 1900s, but it was actually run by a con man who purposefully sought out rich families with ailing elders. He would trick the families into checking their sick family members into the hospital, where they would never come out, periodically forcing them to write to their family to ask for more money. Some of them would die and the deaths would go unreported, and letters would still be sent to the family asking for money as if they had never died. Needless to say, the hotel is reportedly very haunted.

[[Category:Settings]]

[[Category:Medical Horror]]

[[Category:Abuse Tropes]]