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.
