Bedlam House: Difference between revisions

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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]]''.

 

== Literature ==

* Arkham Asylum was named after [[HP 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 (Literature)|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]]''.

== Live-Action TV ==

* An early two-parter on ''[[Alias (TV)|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]].

* ''[[Law and Order Special Victims Unit]]'': The [[Bedlam House]]-esque psych home where the nurses don't speak English, people wander around without pants, and one woman died of heat stroke was a scam run by a man providing bare minimum care while padding his own pockets with rest of the government's funds.

* The ''[[Torchwood (TV)|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.

* An episode of ''[[Ghost Whisperer]]'' had a former insane asylum that was being turned into a school. Melinda was worried that one of a handful of insane ghosts was a negative influence on the young students, but the ghost was only trying to give them a [[Survival Mantra]] ([[Ironic Nursery Rhyme|"Frère Jacques"]]) against the influence of her psychotic doctor's ghost.

* Averted in ''[[House (TV)|House]]'', when the eponymous character eventually checks into a mental hospital in the finale of season 5. It doesn't look very promising from the outside, but the staff are honestly trying to help him - the biggest issue is House ''accepting'' the help. The other patients prove to be interesting influences on House.

* The eponymous house in ''[[Bedlam (TV)|Bedlam]]'', although it's being turned into luxury apartments.

* ''[[MacGyver]]'': In "A Prisoner of Conscience", Mac fakes insanity so he can infiltrate a Russian mental hospital to break out a political dissident.

== Video Games ==

* ''[[Baldurs Gate]] II'' features Spellhold: A combined dumping ground for dissidents, "magical deviants" and madmen. That's how it STARTS. Then the [[Big Bad]] takes over.

* In ''[[Call of Duty]] 5'', the second Nazi Zombie mode map Verruckt is an [[Abandoned Hospital|abandoned asylum]] with all the usual stigmata of this trope: blood stained rooms, electric barriers, power outage, [[Room Full of Crazy|crazy writing on walls]] and rather dangerous looking medical equipment.

** 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.

* 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''.

 

* Poveglia Island, located in the bay of Venice, housed a [[Bedlam House]] which was directed by a lobotomy-enthusiastic doctor. Before that, it was used for dumping thousands of terminally sick people (most of them suffering from the Black Plague) there to die.

* [[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!]]

** 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.

*** Most of the medications that are older than roughly 25 years are, well, entirely random guesses used because it ''looked'' like they worked. Doctors will still prescribe medications that haven't been yanked from the market purely because the ''only'' known treatment for their side effects is to ''keep'' taking them. In case this isn't horrible enough to you, try keeping up with the implications of current research--particularly the ones that indicate that not only are some forms of insanity pretty much [[Body Horror|you getting to feel the effects of your brain dying]] or something equally pleasant, but that any cure (not counting prevention) will be [[Nightmare Fuel]] of a [[Gone Horribly Wrong|different flavor]]...

* Interestingly, while Bethlehem Royal is the [[Ur Example]], it was also one of the first subversions. In the 19th century, the director and surgeon were hauled up before a medical board and summarily dismissed. The new regime focused on occupational therapy and integrating the patients into society -- although this was admittedly made easier by the fact the "incurables" were now being sent to Broadmoor Criminal Asylum, which was the old Bedlam [[But More So]].

* [[Emilie Autumn]] wrote her book, ''[[The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls]]'', about her experiences in a real life example of this trope.

** Another account is "Down Below" by [[Surrealism|Leonora Carrington]], who was given experimental seizure-inducing drugs when she was interned after a nervous breakdown.

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[[Category:Medical Horror]]