Horror Stories Aren't Just For TV

(written 3/26/2015)

Nuns, demonic possession, a serial killer, and failed experiments on human subjects were just a few plot twists that glued viewers to American Horror Story: Asylum.

In the second installment of the award-winning series, the writers of American Horror Story take us to Briarcliff Manor in the mid-1960s, a place to house and treat the mentally ill and criminally insane.  If the setting alone wasn't enough to give goosebumps, the patients endure even more insanity.

Several patients are put in solitary confinement or strapped to beds.  One character, young journalist Lana Winters, is institutionalized for being a lesbian, and suffers through methods to "cure her" such as "reform" treatment involving the naked male form to train her brain to think straight, and even electroshock therapy, where electric pulses are sent to the brain in order to "restart" it as the patient gets a jolt, some powerful enough to send them into seizures.  Another character, accused of murder and later discovered to be a sexual abuse victim, has her legs amputated for causing trouble and being caught having sex with another patient.  Finally, there is Dr. Arden, a former Nazi who performs experiments on the patients in hopes of creating a sort of "super human" by injecting them with a cocktail of tuberculosis and syphilis.  Instead, this creates diseased mutants.

The circumstances that unfold in Asylum seem severe and far-fetched, but what if they weren't so far out there? What if the abuse seen in the show is not a completely fictional concept in the mind of show creator Ryan Murphy? What if some of the things we shudder at from out couches actually happened?

Asylums are places the mentally unstable can go to receive treatment for their conditions.  However, in the 1960s and prior, these institutions were not always known for their impeccable care of such individuals, which were usually dumped by families who didn't know how to care for them or didn't want to.  Ryan Murphy stated in an article from Progressive Pulse that he was both obsessed with and inspired by the story of the Willowbrook State School.

Willowbrok was a state-supported institution for children with intellectual disabilities.  At one point, they housed about 2,000 patients more than their capacity, and held a reputation for being a sort of warehouse for New York City's mentally ill.  Eventually, reports arose of an outbreak of hepatitis.  With no known cure, doctors and staff members began to feed live viruses to both the healthy and disabled children, hoping that seeing how the disease developed would help to stop it.  Instead, it only spread faster.

Then, in 1972, a young Geraldo Rivera busted the doors of Willowbrook wide open with a series of investigations called Willowbrook: The Last Disgrace, a situation that is revisited in Asylum when Lana Winters does the same with Briarcliff.  Rivera exposed the overcrowding, poor sanitation, and physical and sexual abuse at Willowbrook, opening the country's eyes to what was really going on and leading to the institution's closing.

Willowbrook was not the only one of its kind, though.  Asylums across the United States and across the world used appalling methods for the sake of "treatment."  Hydrotherapy was a method of treatment involving continuous bathing, sometimes for hours or overnight.  Soaking in hot water was used to treat conditions like insomnia, and sprays with cold water were used to treat depression.  Electroshock therapy and insulin coma therapy, where the patient was injected with insulin until they were sent into a coma, were also common.  In a documentary about Pennhurst Asylum, Bill Baldini reports that the staff would inject the bully patients with whatever would cause them the most discomfort without permanently hurting them.  Perhaps the "granddaddy of them all," however, was the lobotomy.  This procedure, said to have been perfected at Danvers State Lunatic Asylum, involved a small ice pick inserted into the brain through eyeball, intended to reset the frontal lobe, where most believed mental problems came from.  While there were some positive results, the huge majority ended up as vegetables.

Many of the problems with asylums in this era stemmed from lack of funding, which affected the conditions of the actual building along with money for treatment and proper care.  Many individuals were neglected and even abused.  With the founding of organizations like the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and a drastic change in both medical advances and healthcare, many asylums were closed by the 1980s.  Many of the buildings still stand, and most are rumored to be haunted by those that never truly left, the unwanted and unstable.