History of Mental Health in the US

After finishing Girl, Interrupted, I googled Susanna Kaysen because I was curious about her life following her memoir’s publication and subsequent popularity, and I found this interview from this May, where Kaysen reflected on the book thirty years later. I was especially intrigued by her answer to the question of what positive changes she has seen in the field of mental health care, to which she asked if she had to have seen any. She elaborated that she felt that the decrease in stigma has led to the over-medicalization of what are rational emotional reactions to the stressors of modern life (she brought up covid at various other points as one such example) and expressed mixed feelings about reduced periods of hospitalization as it did prevent people from becoming disconnected from the “outside world” but also as a result the hospital no longer felt like a refuge. This was interesting to me because these so often are thought of as “advancements” and part of an overall improvement of mental health care, but Kaysen obviously felt otherwise and had clear reasons for doing so that made sense when she explained them.

Lately I’ve been trying to waste less time scrolling on Twitter and as a result have taken to wasting more time scrolling on Pinterest, which is where I found this really wonderful image of a My Little Pony character edited into what appears to be an old picture of a gate labeled “hospital for the insane.” While unfortunately I do not think that I will be able to work this into my project, it does tie into the larger question of what sort of reactions people have to the physical environment of historic psychiatric hospitals. Here, the punchline is both the literal and more subtextual juxtaposition between a bright image from a piece of children’s media and a darker image of something that overall has a negative connotation (since saving this, my Pinterest feed has been overtaken by similar memes, the majority of which I’ve seen using photos of dark y2k era bedrooms or, and this has been particularly interesting to me given my own area of study, pictures from around the Soviet Union). The brief discussion of popular references to lobotomies last class immediately made me think of this, and it also reminded me a lot of the jokes made about “Kirkbride core” images earlier in the semester with the sort of aestheticization of that era of mental health care.