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24. Melancholia, Menstrual Derangement & Bad Whiskey Pt. 1 image

24. Melancholia, Menstrual Derangement & Bad Whiskey Pt. 1

E24 · Unpacking The Eerie
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DARK HISTORY/HAUNTINGS: Weston State Hospital/History of Asylums
CW: ableism, racism, gender-based violence, psychiatric trauma, abuse

In the late 1800s, America would become home to a new wave of “mental health” institutions we now know as asylums. The Weston State Hospital (aka The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum) was one of many of these “state of the art” facilities. This episode Is all about how aspirations for palatial, elite experiences for (white) mentally ill patients quickly descended into the picture that you probably have of these places - carceral sites of unspeakable cruelty and dehumanization for those who were multiply marginalized. There was so much information on this, we’ve decided to break it up into 2 parts. In part one, you’ll learn about why Weston State Hospital is considered one of the most haunted places in the country, the history of asylums as a whole and the social-political climate that led to the extreme rise of people incarcerated in these institutions.   

References



Outro last updated April 2023

FYI: we've recently unpublished older episodes  as we are in process of re-editing for a smoother flow & audio experience. they will be available again as we finish. 

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Transcript

Introduction & Content Warning

00:00:00
Speaker
The way they would have trapped my ass.
00:00:02
Speaker
The way they would have trapped my ass.
00:00:04
Speaker
Melancholia.
00:00:05
Speaker
Yeah, you sad bitch.
00:00:06
Speaker
Yeah.
00:00:07
Speaker
Get in here.
00:00:07
Speaker
I mean, for more than one of these.
00:00:10
Speaker
Yes, I would have gotten laziness, menstrual derangement.
00:00:14
Speaker
Absolutely menstrual derangement.
00:00:16
Speaker
You know what?
00:00:17
Speaker
I'm going to start using that.
00:00:18
Speaker
Disappointed love.
00:00:18
Speaker
Oh my God.
00:00:20
Speaker
Hi, I'm Akshi.
00:00:22
Speaker
And I'm Shana.
00:00:24
Speaker
And you're listening to Unpacking the Eerie.
00:00:26
Speaker
A podcast that explores the intersections of our dark and morbid curiosities through a social justice lens.

Supporting Trans Rights

00:00:34
Speaker
You're welcome.
00:00:43
Speaker
Before we get started, we want to lead with our usual content warning.
00:00:47
Speaker
In this episode, we have discussions that include topics around ableism, racism, gender-based violence, psychiatric trauma, and abuse.
00:00:58
Speaker
We're back for another episode.
00:01:01
Speaker
Yes, hello.
00:01:02
Speaker
Hello.
00:01:03
Speaker
Before we get started today, just wanted to highlight our spring 2023 Ghosty Giver, a new organization called A Place for Marsha.
00:01:17
Speaker
The reason why we decided to choose this organization to be our Ghosty Giver beneficiary is because this year alone in 2023, we're
00:01:28
Speaker
549 anti-trans bills have been proposed across 49 states in the US, 76 of them have been passed and 69 have been signed into law.
00:01:39
Speaker
These include felony charges for providing gender-affirming care to youth under the age of 26, and states across the US continue to attack transgender individuals and their families.
00:01:52
Speaker
Through our podcast, we have seen ways in which gender-based violence permeates through the fabric of our society, and we are currently living in a time where there is a concerted legislative effort to erase transgender people from the public.

Ghost Stories of the Asylum

00:02:09
Speaker
In light of this frightening wave of draconian bills, our Spring Ghosty Giver is a place for Marsha, a newly founded project that aims to help fund and facilitate safe housing for trans folks escaping transphobic states.
00:02:24
Speaker
This organization works by connecting 18 plus trans youth from states with heavy anti-trans legislation with volunteers in safer states who are willing to support them by providing housing.
00:02:37
Speaker
All donations to A Place for Marsha will go towards getting this organization off the ground and supporting moving costs.
00:02:45
Speaker
Thanks so much to our Patreon Ghosty Giver patrons for helping us continue to support community organizations that are doing cool and supportive work.
00:02:58
Speaker
Yeah, well, okay.
00:02:59
Speaker
So today...
00:03:02
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We're going to be covering our first asylum.
00:03:05
Speaker
So buckle up.
00:03:07
Speaker
Our first asylum.
00:03:08
Speaker
Our first asylum.
00:03:09
Speaker
So it's going to be pretty bleak.
00:03:12
Speaker
Yeah, it's pretty bleak.
00:03:13
Speaker
As most of our episodes are.
00:03:15
Speaker
I guess so.
00:03:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:16
Speaker
I'm not sure why I say that to preface every time as if it's not always a thing.
00:03:21
Speaker
This is going to be a lot like all the other ones are not a lot.
00:03:25
Speaker
There's some that aren't.
00:03:26
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I guess it's just like some offer moments of like, ha ha.
00:03:31
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Yeah.
00:03:31
Speaker
And I don't know if there's moments of ha ha here.
00:03:35
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not sure.
00:03:36
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:37
Speaker
But good history for the context of the mental health system that, you know, all of us are entrenched in in different ways.
00:03:45
Speaker
But, you know, especially us because it's our job.
00:03:49
Speaker
True, true, true.
00:03:50
Speaker
Yes, super important.
00:03:51
Speaker
I learned a lot.
00:03:52
Speaker
And I think that realistically, it'll be really hard to condense all of the information that we found.
00:03:59
Speaker
I'm sure there are missing pieces, but we have what we have.
00:04:02
Speaker
So there's that.
00:04:04
Speaker
I'll also add, I think we'll have future opportunities to probably dig deeper into aspects that we weren't able to in this story.
00:04:12
Speaker
Yes.
00:04:13
Speaker
I'm going to share some ghost stories.
00:04:16
Speaker
It's been a while since we, I feel like it's been like over a year since we got some ghosty action.
00:04:21
Speaker
It's true.
00:04:22
Speaker
So that's your thing.
00:04:23
Speaker
Let's hear it.
00:04:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:04:24
Speaker
Share some ghost stories.
00:04:26
Speaker
I think like when, or at least when I'm prompted to think about the most like
00:04:32
Speaker
stereotypically haunted kind of places asylums are at the top of the list and the exploitative nature of it and the dehumanization of making asylums into some like halloween horror fest kind of thing you know there's a lot there and i think
00:04:54
Speaker
These are really ugly places and it makes sense that this lore is tied to the space.
00:04:59
Speaker
But usually that's like where the combo ends, starts and ends, right?
00:05:02
Speaker
Like, ooh, this abandoned place.
00:05:04
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So grotesque.
00:05:05
Speaker
It's haunted.
00:05:06
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So we'll start there, but then we're also going to be unraveling the pieces that brought us to those stories that leave us with the lore and not much, not much else.
00:05:16
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We're going to be covering the Trans-Allegheny Asylum.
00:05:19
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It's also the Weston State Hospital.
00:05:23
Speaker
I probably call it that because I've been having issues with Allegheny.
00:05:27
Speaker
Also, for most of its history, it was called Weston State Hospital.
00:05:32
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It didn't have the trans-Allegheny name for very long, but the reason it's called that now is because the tourist attraction decided to change it back because it has a lunatic asylum.
00:05:45
Speaker
Well, they say the reason they changed it back is because it was its original name, but I think they changed it back because it has the word lunatic in it, which gets more people riled up to come there.
00:05:57
Speaker
Yes.
00:05:58
Speaker
Okay.
00:05:58
Speaker
So you can call it Weston State Hospital.
00:06:00
Speaker
All right.
00:06:01
Speaker
Because I think that's more historically accurate anyway.
00:06:03
Speaker
Okay.
00:06:04
Speaker
That's maybe what I'll do.
00:06:06
Speaker
So it's apparently one of the most haunted places in the country, reportedly.
00:06:10
Speaker
It's not in the world, too, but also I feel like people will say that shit all the time.
00:06:14
Speaker
It's like,
00:06:14
Speaker
this is the most haunted.
00:06:15
Speaker
I was like, by what measure?
00:06:17
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Too many people say that.
00:06:19
Speaker
What's the measure?
00:06:21
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Too many places.
00:06:24
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It's got to be incorrect.
00:06:26
Speaker
At least most of them have to be incorrect.
00:06:28
Speaker
Right.
00:06:29
Speaker
It's good

Critique of Ghost Hunting Practices

00:06:30
Speaker
to say that because there's no measure for what most haunted, least haunted is.
00:06:34
Speaker
I don't know.
00:06:37
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Whatever.
00:06:38
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It has a ring to it, I guess.
00:06:40
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People pay for that.
00:06:41
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That's what it is.
00:06:42
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Exactly.
00:06:43
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So the first article I found kind of opens with how the asylum was purchased more recently by a family of this person named Rebecca Jordan.
00:06:52
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And she says that it was within like the first couple visits that she felt that she was visited by a patient.
00:07:00
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She said that she was giving a tour of the facility and she felt someone grab her shoulder and squeeze it.
00:07:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:05
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Yeah.
00:07:05
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There are two locations in the facility that are supposed to be the most haunted.
00:07:12
Speaker
The first one is the back room.
00:07:16
Speaker
And it's a room towards the back end of one wing of this building.
00:07:20
Speaker
And these are huge, huge facilities, which we'll go into why they were constructed in such a way.
00:07:27
Speaker
But anyway, so it's the way end at one of the wing.
00:07:30
Speaker
A patient, I guess, was violently murdered by two other patients.
00:07:35
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There's, like, this really horrific story around, like, attempted hanging and then crushing his head under a bed frame.
00:07:41
Speaker
No!
00:07:42
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Yeah.
00:07:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:43
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Really violent.
00:07:44
Speaker
I'm not really sure what prompted that.
00:07:47
Speaker
And I also don't know if the story is just lore that makes for good tourism to people.
00:07:54
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:54
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:55
Speaker
But that's the story.
00:07:57
Speaker
And then, you know, there are other patients that I guess were also murdered by their peers in this particular area.
00:08:04
Speaker
And this only increased as the asylum worsened, like as the conditions in the asylum worsened with overcrowding and mistreatment.
00:08:12
Speaker
And, you know, they said that it made for a really hostile environment.
00:08:15
Speaker
And so violence really increased.
00:08:18
Speaker
And it was known to be a site of multiple murders.
00:08:20
Speaker
But this was the most famous one, I guess, was this attempted hanging.
00:08:24
Speaker
And the room is known for its cold spots and its quiet cries, which is said to be from Dean, who was the man in the story who was murdered in his room.
00:08:33
Speaker
They say he's a shy and timid spirit.
00:08:36
Speaker
Sad for Dean.
00:08:39
Speaker
The other place in the facility that's supposed to be a hot spot is the isolation cells.
00:08:45
Speaker
Asylum staff were... Big surprise.
00:08:46
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:08:47
Speaker
The staff there were really overworked and they were irritable and they were impatient.
00:08:52
Speaker
And they were empowered to really, without any oversight, send people into isolation if they felt they were, quote unquote, uncontrollable.
00:08:59
Speaker
And so... And the isolation was...
00:09:02
Speaker
Horrible, right?
00:09:03
Speaker
So patients would do just about anything to get out of it.
00:09:06
Speaker
And so there's a lot of stories around like people banging down the doors and harming themselves.
00:09:12
Speaker
And apparently the rooms used for isolation tend to be the most violent energies attached to them.
00:09:17
Speaker
Visitors report back being pushed or scratched, as well as reporting disembodied voices saying, get me out of here.
00:09:25
Speaker
I wonder if it's like, you know, the kind of like imprinted energy or like they're like the other one where it's like the spirits are like intentionally trying to communicate, which is different.
00:09:35
Speaker
I forget the word for it.
00:09:37
Speaker
Yes.
00:09:37
Speaker
We do go over the definitions of that.
00:09:40
Speaker
Oh, wait.
00:09:42
Speaker
No.
00:09:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:43
Speaker
You did it.
00:09:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:45
Speaker
In the Queen Mary one.
00:09:47
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:47
Speaker
In the Queen Mary one.
00:09:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:49
Speaker
I forget what it's called, though.
00:09:50
Speaker
I think it's like Smart Spirit or some kind of similar.
00:09:54
Speaker
Intelligent?
00:09:54
Speaker
Yeah, Intelligent.
00:09:56
Speaker
I don't know.
00:09:56
Speaker
Something like that.
00:09:57
Speaker
I don't know.
00:09:58
Speaker
One of them is an imprint.
00:10:00
Speaker
There's a nomenclature for ghosts, I guess.
00:10:03
Speaker
Exactly.
00:10:04
Speaker
And we go over

Spirit Theories & Child Ghost of the Asylum

00:10:05
Speaker
that in that one.
00:10:05
Speaker
So you can go check that out.
00:10:07
Speaker
But people seem to report that the isolation cells is more just a violent vibe.
00:10:12
Speaker
And well, visitors say they're pushed and scratched.
00:10:15
Speaker
So maybe there's like a dark.
00:10:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:10:17
Speaker
Like people are reporting like dark or demonic energies that are being drawn to the place.
00:10:22
Speaker
And like now being violent is like, yeah, a common thing that people share.
00:10:29
Speaker
So I was reading a really disrespectful ghost hunting blog about
00:10:36
Speaker
They tend to be that way.
00:10:37
Speaker
It's true.
00:10:38
Speaker
They were just talking about how much fun they had and how funny and silly the ghosts were.
00:10:41
Speaker
And I was like, okay, well, people were really harmed here, but okay.
00:10:47
Speaker
But they did get, they got a lot of content that they posted online.
00:10:53
Speaker
And they were visiting the room that Dean had been murdered in.
00:10:57
Speaker
And they said that the group stepped out into the hallway and noticed that there was one or more shadowy figures and
00:11:04
Speaker
And that they stopped receiving response from Dean because they were using the spirit box.
00:11:10
Speaker
And then they said that the spirit box responses changed to high-pitched screams.
00:11:14
Speaker
Oh my god.
00:11:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:15
Speaker
And then they said... And then the shadow figures, they believed were Jim and David, who are supposedly the people who...
00:11:26
Speaker
had murdered Dean.
00:11:28
Speaker
And apparently when they crowded out into the hall, they all collectively saw a shadow figure paced back and forth at the other side of the hallway in front of the window.
00:11:38
Speaker
And they could see, so there's like light from the outside that kept on being blocked off as like they felt
00:11:44
Speaker
They saw the figure move back and forth.
00:11:47
Speaker
So they felt like that was them.
00:11:49
Speaker
Creepy.
00:11:50
Speaker
Creepy.
00:11:51
Speaker
I don't like it.
00:11:54
Speaker
Okay.
00:11:54
Speaker
Now this is what I mean by disrespectful because they were like, I think we had the most fun on the violent women's ward.
00:12:00
Speaker
Oh my god.
00:12:01
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:02
Speaker
Jeez.
00:12:02
Speaker
So apparently they sent the men down the violent women's ward hallway first.
00:12:09
Speaker
And Donna, who had the noise-canceling headphones, called out words from the spirit box that she was getting.
00:12:19
Speaker
Apparently said, ass explosion, cute, and more.
00:12:24
Speaker
Ass explosion.
00:12:25
Speaker
Ass explosion.
00:12:26
Speaker
And then as the women, though, headed down the hall, they said that the words changed dramatically.
00:12:31
Speaker
leave death whore bitch my gosh yeah the patriarchy lives in the afterlife i guess yeah and then apparently they sent down like small bits of the group down that hallway and back and then all of them kind of reported hearing the same things and
00:12:49
Speaker
And they were like, we were cracking up, but one of the guides were scratched.
00:12:51
Speaker
I was like, why are you cracking up?
00:12:55
Speaker
What's the crack up?
00:12:56
Speaker
Yeah, this is what I mean.
00:12:58
Speaker
But apparently one of them was scratched.
00:12:59
Speaker
One time I was called a rude term by a spirit through the Ouija board and did not crack me up.
00:13:07
Speaker
It made me very scared.
00:13:12
Speaker
it's not funny it's not funny to get called slurs by spirits what they call you a cunt or something yeah wow why didn't you say that oh i don't know i mean yeah that's what they called me okay it wasn't me it was just like in general it was like saying it to us
00:13:33
Speaker
Oh, that was the scary moment, right?
00:13:34
Speaker
Because you were like, no one in this group.
00:13:37
Speaker
Yeah, no one in this group would just say that, you know, because it's like not cool to just call someone a cunt for no reason.
00:13:46
Speaker
Unless you're like, ooh, cunty, like in like the slay way.
00:13:51
Speaker
That's a positive use of the word cunt.
00:13:57
Speaker
Okay.
00:13:57
Speaker
There's also...
00:14:02
Speaker
There was also another story that's a little less, like, dark energy vibes.
00:14:08
Speaker
I watched a small clip from Ghost Adventures, you know, that cheesy show on the travel channel.
00:14:13
Speaker
You know, they're like... Zach Bagans.
00:14:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:16
Speaker
But one of the travel guides who was interviewed was saying that there's a lady on her tour that kept saying, oh my God.
00:14:21
Speaker
And the tour guide was like, what's going on?
00:14:23
Speaker
And I guess she was like, she kept saying, oh my God.
00:14:25
Speaker
And the tour guide was like, can you tell me what you're seeing?
00:14:29
Speaker
And she said that a Victorian dress woman with a high neck collar just walked up to that woman, pointed to someone else in the group and was staring at her.
00:14:37
Speaker
And then just walked away.
00:14:38
Speaker
Scary.
00:14:38
Speaker
Ooh.
00:14:40
Speaker
I was... Ooh.
00:14:41
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know.
00:14:42
Speaker
Things like that give me more chills than, like, I don't know, some of the darker things.
00:14:48
Speaker
Because I'm just like, that's eerie.
00:14:51
Speaker
So mundane.
00:14:52
Speaker
That's true.
00:14:53
Speaker
Yeah, you know what?
00:14:55
Speaker
I know that, like, when people sleepwalk sometimes, sometimes they'll just stand there and stare.
00:14:59
Speaker
That shit freaks me out.
00:15:00
Speaker
That shit freaks me the fuck out.
00:15:02
Speaker
I don't think I can do that.
00:15:04
Speaker
I don't know if I have shared this in the podcast.
00:15:06
Speaker
I don't think I can deal with that.
00:15:08
Speaker
Before, but when I was a kid, I used to not sleepwalk, but I would get scared at night.
00:15:14
Speaker
And then I would go to my parents' room and then just stand next to the bed.
00:15:18
Speaker
Until they woke up.
00:15:19
Speaker
That's fucking terrifying, actually.
00:15:20
Speaker
Because I didn't want to wake them up, so I would just wait until they noticed that I was there.
00:15:26
Speaker
That is so scary.
00:15:27
Speaker
A small child?
00:15:29
Speaker
Terrifying.
00:15:33
Speaker
No.
00:15:35
Speaker
So anyways, I get what you're saying.
00:15:36
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:37
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:38
Speaker
It's like, oh, creepy.
00:15:39
Speaker
There's something.
00:15:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:40
Speaker
Someone's just like standing next to you and like looking at you.
00:15:43
Speaker
Weird.
00:15:44
Speaker
It's the unknown.
00:15:45
Speaker
It's the uncertainty.
00:15:46
Speaker
Like, what are you doing?
00:15:47
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:47
Speaker
Other things feel very human reactions.
00:15:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:50
Speaker
Anger or whatever.
00:15:51
Speaker
You're like, okay.
00:15:53
Speaker
There's something unsettling about someone just staring at you.
00:15:56
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:56
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:57
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:57
Speaker
It's true.
00:15:58
Speaker
It's like, what are you trying to do?
00:15:59
Speaker
What's the motivation?
00:16:00
Speaker
What's going on here?
00:16:02
Speaker
And then there was another story where apparently there was a festival happening in the area.
00:16:08
Speaker
And so the staff went to make sure that no one was in the building.
00:16:10
Speaker
And when they went in there, they encountered a man.
00:16:13
Speaker
And they were like, what are you doing here?
00:16:15
Speaker
And he was like, well, I'm trying to find a way out of here.
00:16:17
Speaker
And then when they went to go follow him to be like, you can't be here.
00:16:21
Speaker
It's like off hours.
00:16:22
Speaker
He disappeared.
00:16:23
Speaker
And they have no idea where this man went.
00:16:25
Speaker
And it was kind of too quick of a disappearance for them to be like, that was a person.
00:16:29
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:30
Speaker
And then there's, like, resident spirits that are reported there.
00:16:34
Speaker
I didn't get details on all of them, but apparently there are eight consistent stories.
00:16:39
Speaker
Like, eight specific spirits that people talk about over and over.
00:16:43
Speaker
One of them is named Lily, a child who was born into the asylum.
00:16:47
Speaker
Apparently she spent her whole life there.
00:16:50
Speaker
What?
00:16:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:52
Speaker
So it was really common that women would come in there pregnant.
00:16:55
Speaker
Okay.
00:16:55
Speaker
And then they would just have children there.
00:16:56
Speaker
And if, you know... Yeah.
00:16:58
Speaker
They stayed there with their mother...
00:17:00
Speaker
Right, right, right.
00:17:01
Speaker
At least they weren't separated.
00:17:02
Speaker
Yeah, I guess.
00:17:04
Speaker
I don't know.
00:17:06
Speaker
It feels like they're all...
00:17:09
Speaker
double-edged sword situation.
00:17:11
Speaker
Yeah, for sure.
00:17:12
Speaker
Yeah, but the kid died of pneumonia at age nine.
00:17:15
Speaker
So they say that if you set up her playroom, you can hear her laughs and her cries.
00:17:21
Speaker
But she said that she's playful and friendly most of the time.
00:17:23
Speaker
People hear laughter a lot.
00:17:25
Speaker
And then if you set up her playroom, she'll play games with you, they say.
00:17:31
Speaker
So this woman who was on the ghost adventures and was an asylum expert, apparently, I don't know what that means exactly.
00:17:39
Speaker
I don't know what that means, Shelly.
00:17:43
Speaker
But she was being interviewed.
00:17:44
Speaker
Apparently she lives nearby, too.
00:17:46
Speaker
I don't want anyone to ever refer to me as an expert of anything except my own experience in life.
00:17:55
Speaker
I would not feel comfortable with that, but clearly people are like, yeah, I feel comfortable being labeled as an expert.
00:18:01
Speaker
Oh.
00:18:01
Speaker
Weird.
00:18:02
Speaker
Anyways.
00:18:02
Speaker
You're the expert of your own experience, actually.
00:18:04
Speaker
We all are.
00:18:05
Speaker
Yes.
00:18:05
Speaker
That was the most therapist thing I've ever heard you say in your entire life.
00:18:10
Speaker
I want you to know.
00:18:12
Speaker
I want you to know that.
00:18:15
Speaker
But apparently, so she sets up the space and she put a ball down in the middle of a room, asked Lily if she wanted to play.
00:18:23
Speaker
And the ball, they like stepped away from the ball.
00:18:25
Speaker
The ball rolls to the wall and then starts bouncing to the other side of the room.
00:18:30
Speaker
They love to use balls and ghost hunting things.
00:18:33
Speaker
They do.
00:18:34
Speaker
They're like, oh, play with the ball.
00:18:36
Speaker
But that's really creepy to...
00:18:39
Speaker
watch that happen yeah can you imagine how condescending you play with this ball yeah who the fuck do you think i am yeah what if i don't like to play with balls what if i like to play with dolls or something else you know so this is our entertainment for you i'm stuck here yeah in this hellhole get me out true it's like send a medium that can help me pass to the next life
00:19:04
Speaker
Well, so there was a psychic that they interviewed on Ghost Adventures.
00:19:12
Speaker
They have to sprinkle in a psychic somewhere.
00:19:14
Speaker
They're always so serious, too.
00:19:16
Speaker
But she was saying that she thinks that lilies suck there because she's confused.
00:19:21
Speaker
And she doesn't know that she can leave.
00:19:25
Speaker
She wants to go home, but there's no home to go to.
00:19:28
Speaker
So she's like in this liminal space is what she was saying.
00:19:32
Speaker
And she seemed, she seemed really sad for Lily.
00:19:35
Speaker
Yeah, that's rough.
00:19:36
Speaker
Yeah, that would suck.
00:19:37
Speaker
That would be... I did read, though, like, I was reading this book, it's called Destiny of Souls, where this hypnotherapist gets people to remember, like, what was happening in between their lives.
00:19:49
Speaker
And there's certainly stories where people get confused and, like, get confused after they die on, like, what they're supposed to do.
00:19:56
Speaker
But also

The Ethics of Haunted Tourism

00:19:57
Speaker
because time works differently in the spirit world, like, maybe they're accessing this, but Lily was actually at some point able to, like,
00:20:05
Speaker
you know, transfer to her next life, but they're still accessing Lily at this point of time because time just works differently.
00:20:12
Speaker
Like it's not something that exists in the spirit world.
00:20:16
Speaker
And people's souls can also like fracture in a way.
00:20:20
Speaker
This is what this book is saying.
00:20:22
Speaker
The destiny of souls book based on all of these like hypnotherapy things that this dude did on a lot of people.
00:20:28
Speaker
He said in that one that people's souls can, like, fracture in a way where, like, part of their soul stays in the spirit world and part of their soul, like, reincarnates.
00:20:38
Speaker
So, like, those things could, like, part of Lily's soul could still be at the asylum, whereas, like, another part of her soul could have gone on to the next life or something like that.
00:20:47
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:20:48
Speaker
so weird interesting concept yeah so many possibilities so many possibilities so sad though to be born in an asylum and then die there damn what the fuck yeah what the hell i i would rather like if i was gonna be born there like that yeah i wasn't ever gonna leave best case scenario i'm dying try again young you know get to start over yeah exactly where you do yeah
00:21:11
Speaker
restart reset button yeah unplug plug back in you know there's another ghost who's apparently named jim james and he lives in one of the rooms and uh there was somebody who spent the night there and they said that they didn't really experience anything outside of this but they were given these flashlights um
00:21:33
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:55
Speaker
gem a cigarette.
00:21:56
Speaker
Okay.
00:21:57
Speaker
And he apparently responded some kind of way because the light went back off.
00:22:01
Speaker
Oh, okay.
00:22:02
Speaker
And then it never went back on.
00:22:03
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:22:05
Speaker
And they were, like, talking about how that was an eerie experience and they didn't really know how to explain it.
00:22:12
Speaker
But the rest of the time, I think that was their only moment.
00:22:15
Speaker
I don't know if they explored other places.
00:22:17
Speaker
I don't know how much of it is off-limits to, like, when you're staying the night.
00:22:20
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:21
Speaker
Who stays the night?
00:22:23
Speaker
And who's allowing this?
00:22:24
Speaker
I'm not sure.
00:22:25
Speaker
I mean, I have info about that.
00:22:27
Speaker
This place especially has, like, really a lot.
00:22:31
Speaker
Okay.
00:22:31
Speaker
Well, I don't understand.
00:22:33
Speaker
I don't understand.
00:22:34
Speaker
It's bad vibes.
00:22:35
Speaker
I mean, it's just, like, paranormal capitalism or whatever.
00:22:39
Speaker
Oh, 100%.
00:22:39
Speaker
No.
00:22:40
Speaker
It's monies.
00:22:41
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:41
Speaker
Everything's money.
00:22:43
Speaker
They bought the place less than 10 years after it closed.
00:22:48
Speaker
To make it into this tourist destination.
00:22:50
Speaker
That's so ugly.
00:22:51
Speaker
That is so fucking ugly.
00:22:53
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:53
Speaker
Anyways, other experiences, this is the last of the ghosty stuff, but other experiences people report are that there's dark shadows, that there are objects that move on their own, that there are other disembodied voices and cries banging on the walls, glass breaking, and some people report seeing people walking and then like evaporating, disappearing.
00:23:17
Speaker
So haunted ass place.

Historical Development of Asylums

00:23:19
Speaker
This is some of the this is some of the lore, but I'm going to pass it on to Akshi to give us a little information about the dark history of this place and why there might be so many haunting stories connected to it.
00:23:34
Speaker
Yeah, maybe Lake Lanier, too.
00:23:35
Speaker
Oh.
00:23:36
Speaker
That's one of those.
00:23:37
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:23:38
Speaker
Well, yeah.
00:23:39
Speaker
Thank you for sharing those ghost stories.
00:23:42
Speaker
So when the West End State Hospital was kind of at its peak in the 1950s, it had around 2,600 patients, which was...
00:23:56
Speaker
way more than its intended capacity, which we'll get to.
00:24:00
Speaker
But Scott Finn of the Charleston Gazette stated that the hospital was, quote, a dumping ground for unwanted people.
00:24:10
Speaker
He said, the fact that the state legislators did not allocate enough funds to adequately care for the patients in the overcrowded facility resulted in tragic neglect of the most unfortunate citizens in West Virginia.
00:24:22
Speaker
So it had overcrowding, obviously, and then that also led to like poor sanitation, insufficient furniture, poor lighting, and poor heating in much of the complex.
00:24:34
Speaker
And the rooms and corridors were crammed with as many beds as they could hold.
00:24:39
Speaker
And sometimes the same bed was used by multiple patients who used to sleep in shifts.
00:24:44
Speaker
Because there was just so many people there.
00:24:46
Speaker
These, along with the treatments that they used on patients during the time that the hospital was active, led to many deaths, estimated at a 400 to 500 total, but there may be more as there isn't really a record.
00:25:04
Speaker
of those deaths.
00:25:06
Speaker
It didn't start like this.
00:25:08
Speaker
It opened in the late 1800s and it was definitely never intended to be this way.
00:25:13
Speaker
So how did it get to this point?
00:25:15
Speaker
And this is kind of the same story with a lot of different asylums and mental institutions across the nation.
00:25:22
Speaker
So Shana's gonna tell us a little bit about just the origins of mental healthcare.
00:25:26
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:28
Speaker
Yes, we'll say that the intention behind these, completely different, although still had a lot of layers of prejudice and there, you know, was imbued by its own darkness.
00:25:42
Speaker
It was kind of created to be a space of solace exclusively for white.
00:25:49
Speaker
mentally ill patients and everyone else who fell outside of that didn't quite, it wasn't made for anybody else.
00:25:55
Speaker
And no one ever really talks about that.
00:25:57
Speaker
And I, wow, the, I watch this PBS documentary.
00:26:02
Speaker
I read a bunch of articles and I had to really search specifically for any context outside of that because they really do paint the people who created the modern asylum or the, the original asylums as people who wanted to,
00:26:16
Speaker
transform, quote unquote, mad houses into something more humane.
00:26:21
Speaker
But something I want to, something that I want to cover before goes way, way, way back.
00:26:28
Speaker
When we hear about asylums, we have this image of maybe 1700s, 1800s, mostly Western based facilities.
00:26:35
Speaker
And it's kind of framed that
00:26:43
Speaker
This is the invention of mental health care in the world.
00:26:47
Speaker
And that before that, nobody else had a means to deal with mental health.
00:26:52
Speaker
And that's just simply untrue.
00:26:54
Speaker
So I wanted to take a moment to scratch the surface on what was existing before then.
00:27:00
Speaker
So the earliest records across the world looked at mental health through the lens of spirituality.
00:27:04
Speaker
And I think this is true across the board.
00:27:06
Speaker
It was just used differently.
00:27:08
Speaker
And so we have the Utahs in Okinawa who were the who, you know, who were like medicine women slash shamans who dealt with like
00:27:20
Speaker
Who were the people that the community trusted to handle cases with folks who were experiencing maybe psychosis or bouts of mania or anxiety or what have you?
00:27:30
Speaker
And oftentimes Utah were people who did experience hallucinations and there was a spirituality tied to that as well.
00:27:37
Speaker
In tribes across Africa, bewitchment, they considered like
00:27:43
Speaker
some mental illness to be bewitchment.
00:27:45
Speaker
And traditional healers were the people that you would go to to work with that.
00:27:50
Speaker
And there was always this like sense of spiritual duty to care for quote unquote the ill or people experiencing mental health difficulties.
00:28:00
Speaker
And then there's this other piece where in some places, people with mental health, like who experienced hallucinations and all that, they were
00:28:06
Speaker
seen as gifted messengers.
00:28:07
Speaker
And the things that they were experiencing were honored as part of their whole experience and trusted as a way to peer into a world that we as humans don't have access to.
00:28:21
Speaker
So there was a way of honoring people's whole experiences.
00:28:25
Speaker
And even so, this medicalized model of dealing with mental illness obviously didn't exist.
00:28:31
Speaker
And to this day, people still access traditional healers to work
00:28:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:28:57
Speaker
where it wasn't specifically a psychiatric institution.
00:29:01
Speaker
People who were experiencing homelessness, who were orphans, also were included in this housing situation, and they were cared in a facility that they would call a Beitiang Feng, which is like a charity.
00:29:14
Speaker
I guess they called it charity, but I think charity is a very Western idea as well, the way we look at it.
00:29:20
Speaker
But basically it was a free place that was administrated by monks,
00:29:24
Speaker
who would take care of people who didn't have anywhere else to go or it seemed like they had a hard time caring for themselves or they didn't have family.
00:29:32
Speaker
But the one thing that I really want to highlight, because we don't hear about this ever, ever, the first mental hospital specifically in the world was built in Baghdad, Iraq.
00:29:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:44
Speaker
Wow.
00:29:44
Speaker
In Baghdad, Iraq, in the 7th and 8th century, by two people, al-Razi and ibn Sina,
00:29:51
Speaker
We never hear that.
00:29:52
Speaker
No, I've never heard of that before.
00:29:54
Speaker
We never fucking hear that.
00:29:56
Speaker
This is like a millennia before we ever talk about the...
00:30:01
Speaker
psych hospitals.
00:30:03
Speaker
And so apparently these hospitals would be centered in the middle of town, integrated into society, rooted in the belief that the sick should be visited regularly.
00:30:13
Speaker
And so it was like a common practice.
00:30:15
Speaker
It's rooted in Islamic tradition.
00:30:18
Speaker
So it's like a shared community custom to visit people who are ill.
00:30:23
Speaker
They didn't have to be your friends or your neighbors or your kin.
00:30:26
Speaker
And
00:30:30
Speaker
These spaces were built with luscious gardens and fountains to support calmness.
00:30:35
Speaker
People were given money upon discharge to help, and they helped for a while afterwards so that they could get back on their feet.
00:30:41
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:30:42
Speaker
It opened after the development of their first medical hospital where they noticed there was a need for specific mental health care.
00:30:48
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:30:49
Speaker
So the presence of psych hospitals spread throughout the Middle East in Islamic-centered nations.
00:30:55
Speaker
And they created compound drugs, stimulants, suppressants, sedatives, antidepressants.
00:31:01
Speaker
It roughly translates the word that they used for antidepressants roughly translates as like gladdener of the spirit.
00:31:06
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:31:07
Speaker
And it was used alongside holistic treatment to minimize side effects.
00:31:10
Speaker
So sound therapy, which included reading the Quran, music, bringing people to water, bird songs.
00:31:17
Speaker
They offer people regular baths because hygiene was really important.
00:31:21
Speaker
Wholesome food, immersion in nature, cupping, massage, massage.
00:31:27
Speaker
They prioritize agency, dignity, privacy, comfort.
00:31:30
Speaker
Each patient was offered their own quarters and a safe place to put their things.
00:31:34
Speaker
Involuntary hospitalization was extremely rare.
00:31:37
Speaker
People had the choice to check in except for extreme cases.
00:31:40
Speaker
But even then, they had a chance to kind of argue their case with the court, being like, I don't agree with this.
00:31:48
Speaker
And if they couldn't, if their family agreed to be their guardian, they would reverse the, you know,
00:31:54
Speaker
The involuntary.
00:31:55
Speaker
Right.
00:31:56
Speaker
That sounds so lovely.
00:31:58
Speaker
I know.
00:31:59
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:59
Speaker
Honestly, I was reading this and I was like, wow, what?
00:32:03
Speaker
So long ago.
00:32:04
Speaker
In 800, people were implementing these really holistic, beautiful models for care.
00:32:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:10
Speaker
And honestly, really streamlined, really structured, really intricate.
00:32:15
Speaker
Integrated into community as well.
00:32:18
Speaker
So not like an isolating thing.
00:32:19
Speaker
So it helps people to reintegrate after they leave.
00:32:23
Speaker
It's so simple.
00:32:24
Speaker
And we act like it's so unrealistic to provide such a thing.
00:32:29
Speaker
But we also call ourselves the most developed world we have ever seen.
00:32:32
Speaker
And it just feels really incongruent.
00:32:34
Speaker
Unlike the level of inhumanity that exists during this time where we're told is like, oh, so advanced.
00:32:42
Speaker
Trash.
00:32:44
Speaker
Lies.
00:32:45
Speaker
But anyways, also, it's not that like psychiatric treatment or they didn't call it that.
00:32:52
Speaker
These places that we would call like psych hospitals now was not the only pathway of care offered.
00:32:58
Speaker
And so it's not like an end all be all.
00:33:01
Speaker
It was like this is a
00:33:03
Speaker
This is an offer for you to have a retreat moment, to focus on you and your needs, to have access to anything that would like enliven your quality of life.
00:33:16
Speaker
And there are all these other things outside of this institution that are available to you as well.
00:33:22
Speaker
And then so, like, as I mentioned, it was, like, a collective social responsibility to visit people that were considered ill.
00:33:30
Speaker
And it was a norm that people reported the conditions and treatment in these institutions with great detail.
00:33:34
Speaker
People would routinely visit hospitals, these psych spaces, and
00:33:40
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:33:56
Speaker
Which is such a difference from what we know now as like audits and like the assumption that if gone unchecked, institutions would go awry with horrible methods of whatever, which is true.
00:34:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:11
Speaker
But it doesn't have to be true.
00:34:13
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:13
Speaker
And it completely...
00:34:19
Speaker
in institutions oh that too you know it's like oh once a week for this one specific hour and we're gonna make it like if you're 15 minutes late you can't come in anymore and it's just like who is it serving to make it so hard to visit people who definitely need extra community support you know
00:34:41
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:42
Speaker
I mean, I'm not sure.
00:34:43
Speaker
I'm not sure either.
00:34:45
Speaker
I'm not sure, because what the fuck?
00:34:47
Speaker
I mean, I think, again, it always just comes down to liability for the institutions.
00:34:52
Speaker
They're like, oh, well, if we're allowing people in whenever, then we're going to be liable if anything happens, you know.
00:34:58
Speaker
So on top of that, these buildings were really intended to make sure that people felt safe in them.
00:35:07
Speaker
And so there were doormen that stood watch at every entryway.
00:35:10
Speaker
Windows all faced the garden as opposed to the street so that people had privacy.
00:35:15
Speaker
There were stewards who were specifically there to guard their items so that no one was concerned that anything of theirs would be stolen when it was left, you know, unintended to.
00:35:23
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:35:24
Speaker
Endowment records show that there was a hiring process as well, and they prioritize qualities like kindness.
00:35:32
Speaker
So clearly super intentional about who it was that they invited into the space.
00:35:39
Speaker
Architects prioritized things like air quality and natural air fresheners were built into the floors.
00:35:45
Speaker
So they would take things like pomegranate and other herbs.
00:35:49
Speaker
They built it into the floors so that it would smell nice in there.
00:35:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:53
Speaker
And then always made sure that even though it was in the center of the city, it had access to nature.
00:35:58
Speaker
And, like, these are all things that feel pretty intuitive.
00:36:01
Speaker
And I think now we have all this, like, quote-unquote scientific backing to show that, like, yes, it does lower anxiety and lower levels of depression when we...
00:36:14
Speaker
access nature more readily like even just the presence of what looks like plants in your space changes your mental well-being like that alone and i just feel like innately people knew that like living in a space that felt good would promote well-being i'll go figure huh
00:36:34
Speaker
So the architecture was beautiful.
00:36:36
Speaker
It was equal priority.
00:36:38
Speaker
Oh, it was an equal priority to the people who created it.
00:36:41
Speaker
Oh, right, right, right.
00:36:42
Speaker
That makes sense.
00:36:43
Speaker
You know, that the space be beautiful and functional.
00:36:45
Speaker
And, you know, there was also like intricate like water systems and stuff.
00:36:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:36:51
Speaker
I mean, all of that is like, you know, necessary.
00:36:54
Speaker
Yeah.
00:36:55
Speaker
It's like our basic needs.
00:36:57
Speaker
It is.
00:36:57
Speaker
And our ancestors all grew up living in the forest or whatever.
00:37:01
Speaker
Maybe not specifically the forest, but outside.
00:37:05
Speaker
So it makes sense that we have- Evolved with nature.
00:37:08
Speaker
Yeah.
00:37:09
Speaker
Yes.
00:37:09
Speaker
And it's part of our genetics to feel like an improved sense of well-being when we're surrounded by nature.
00:37:16
Speaker
Yes, 100%.
00:37:17
Speaker
And I guess I emphasize the like water systems within the facility because people often talk about pre-westernized societies as primitive and simple and like underdeveloped.
00:37:34
Speaker
And this is clearly just a lie, you know?
00:37:38
Speaker
And like, I know that there's also like tons of
00:37:42
Speaker
like indigenous tribes who reported like very large spaces of land, like city-like centers almost that also had like intricate trade routes and water systems within spaces that they were living.
00:37:59
Speaker
And, you know, like there was a lot of complexity in the infrastructure of these spaces.
00:38:04
Speaker
And it's just a lie that Western society has invented them.
00:38:10
Speaker
Meanwhile, you have, like, what?
00:38:12
Speaker
People in Europe shitting in buckets and throwing them into the street for how long?
00:38:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:38:17
Speaker
Not bathing for how long?
00:38:19
Speaker
Not being able to drink their water because they throw their shit in the water and now they just have to drink beer?
00:38:25
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:38:26
Speaker
And, you know, like, the Indus Valley civilization...
00:38:30
Speaker
which existed between 3,300 BCE to 1300 BCE, so hundreds of years before even this, too, and it's a similar region of the world as where this was taking place, they had freaking underground drains that we use now.
00:38:52
Speaker
And most of them, they had houses made of brick, but they had a very...
00:38:58
Speaker
intricate sanitation system yeah you know and then like pyramids hello we still don't even know how those were yeah yeah yeah there's so much there and it just it makes like literal sense that someplace that was close to the first known area of civilization in the world like mesopotamia would have more intricate systems because there was more time to build it yeah
00:39:22
Speaker
Totally.
00:39:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:39:23
Speaker
Anyways.
00:39:25
Speaker
So medical institutions in Baghdad were really generously supported by leaders and well-to-do families.
00:39:34
Speaker
So they were all really well-resourced.
00:39:36
Speaker
And like, you know, this is not to like paint an overly utopian view of any one civilization because it's not real, you know?
00:39:47
Speaker
Like it's not all or nothing.
00:39:48
Speaker
So like, it's not that like,
00:39:50
Speaker
financial hierarchy didn't exist in any capacity, for example.
00:39:53
Speaker
Like that is true.
00:39:55
Speaker
But the priorities of the community were really in line with the betterment of everybody because it was rooted in spiritual values that were shared.
00:40:05
Speaker
And it was about shared humanity as opposed to, I guess, like what we now tie to a lot of organized religion and imposed like social control.
00:40:17
Speaker
Yeah, it was less of that.
00:40:20
Speaker
And so like medical institutions, including this like psych, like the psych centric institution were both really, really well resourced because the community, the community buy in was there.
00:40:39
Speaker
And also looked at mental health as an equal priority to physical health.
00:40:44
Speaker
These places were open to people of all religions, not just people who were Muslim.
00:40:50
Speaker
And they conducted research and they trained the next generation of practitioners.
00:40:54
Speaker
And that was open to people of all faiths as well.
00:40:58
Speaker
Dr. Rania Awad, who I learned all of this from, I'll put the video in the show notes because I think that the series actually really...
00:41:07
Speaker
really informative.
00:41:08
Speaker
Notes that this is a really stark contrast to Byzantine institutions that you would look to in like Europe.
00:41:18
Speaker
And she says, always under the control of the clergy.
00:41:21
Speaker
Something we often hear from Western institutions is that before Europe and before the age of enlightenment, there was nothing, that the world was simply dark and humanity was in the dark ages.
00:41:30
Speaker
You can see here that this is simply not the case.
00:41:32
Speaker
A millennia before treatment for mental illness even reached Europe, you had Muslims who
00:41:37
Speaker
who were practicing holistic therapy in hospitals that emphasize people's agency, social inclusion, and their economic needs.
00:41:44
Speaker
So next time you hear or read about the Dark Ages, challenge yourself to question where this information is coming from and why they have neglected to mention at all any of the things we discussed here today.
00:41:54
Speaker
It may be that it was the Dark Ages in Europe, but it certainly was bright in the Muslim world.
00:41:58
Speaker
And I was like, ooh.
00:42:01
Speaker
Real.
00:42:01
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:42:02
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:42:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:04
Speaker
So I wanted to start there because we never start there.
00:42:09
Speaker
And we see the stark contrast from what we now know as quote-unquote mental institutions and what this was.
00:42:16
Speaker
But also, like, there were efforts from Quakers to try to replicate pieces of this.
00:42:23
Speaker
Whether or not they know that this is its origin story is another, you know.
00:42:28
Speaker
But there was still an air of exclusivity around it.
00:42:30
Speaker
They never envisioned this kind of fullness for people who were not seen as their in-group.
00:42:38
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:42:39
Speaker
Other recorded hospitals show up much later.
00:42:41
Speaker
The word asylum comes from the earliest religious institutions, which provided quote-unquote asylum in the sense of refuge to the mentally ill.
00:42:50
Speaker
That was like the framework.
00:42:52
Speaker
And one of the oldest such institutions was in Bethlehem, which began in 1247 as part of the priority of the new order of Our Lady of Bethlehem.
00:43:03
Speaker
in the city of London.
00:43:04
Speaker
So this is where we start seeing asylums in Europe kind of pop up under the umbrella of Christian values.
00:43:14
Speaker
There was a hospital in Valencia, Spain in 1406, in San Hippolito in Mexico in 1566.
00:43:21
Speaker
There was La Maison de Charenton in France in 1641 and the Lunatics Tower in Vienna in 1784.
00:43:29
Speaker
Yikes.
00:43:30
Speaker
What the fuck is going on in the Lunatics Tower?
00:43:32
Speaker
Oh my gosh.
00:43:33
Speaker
I don't even want to know.
00:43:34
Speaker
I don't want to know.
00:43:36
Speaker
The mental asylum spread massively across Europe in 1878.
00:43:38
Speaker
There were 104 establishments for mental patients in France, and in 1899, there were 279 in Germany.
00:43:50
Speaker
Yes.
00:43:50
Speaker
Over the course of a few centuries, it's a norm, right?
00:43:55
Speaker
Families during this time often paid to have their own committed into quote unquote mad houses, which provided shelter, but was devoid of any treatment.
00:44:03
Speaker
The treatment piece came much later in the 1800s for these places.
00:44:07
Speaker
Bedlam in England locked where people people were locked in cells and tourists were like visited to gawk at everybody like a god yes I mean that's kind of like in the circus when they have 100% it is very circus vibes and also they did the same thing like in the Congo
00:44:28
Speaker
When the Belgians took over and colonized the Congo, they did that to enslave people as well.
00:44:35
Speaker
It's like a legacy of colonizing nations to dehumanize people so badly that you create a spectacle out of suffering people.
00:44:46
Speaker
Yeah, I once had a dream about that.
00:44:48
Speaker
It was actually a few weeks ago.
00:44:49
Speaker
Dream about what?
00:44:50
Speaker
That I was visiting this island that had a zoo of people in it.
00:44:55
Speaker
And I remember being really upset about it.
00:44:57
Speaker
Yeah, and people would, it was like I was in a boat and the people were on the land and you were looking at the people that were on the zoo in the land.
00:45:07
Speaker
It was weird.
00:45:08
Speaker
I don't know.
00:45:09
Speaker
While I was accessing there.
00:45:11
Speaker
You were accessing something, huh?
00:45:12
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:13
Speaker
You think that's a past life?
00:45:14
Speaker
Yeah, I think it could have been.
00:45:15
Speaker
It definitely had that kind of energy.
00:45:19
Speaker
of like a different time for sure.
00:45:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:24
Speaker
I could see you doing that.
00:45:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:26
Speaker
Like another long time ago.
00:45:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:28
Speaker
You're visiting like an island for fun.
00:45:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:30
Speaker
And you being like, what?
00:45:32
Speaker
I was like, what's going on?
00:45:34
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:35
Speaker
Yeah, and then later in the dream, I was on the island, and I was trying to not fall off of this cliff because there were snakes in the water.
00:45:46
Speaker
Chaos.
00:45:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:47
Speaker
Alright, alright.
00:45:49
Speaker
Anyway, anyways, I can't help but kind of see the parallels between the normality of
00:45:57
Speaker
Or the normalcy of people just kind of sending their family members when they don't want to take care of them anymore to institutions just in general.
00:46:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:11
Speaker
Like, this feels like a through line.
00:46:13
Speaker
And, like...
00:46:14
Speaker
I don't know.
00:46:15
Speaker
It just seems like a way to put quote unquote difficult people in your family away for not for misbehaving or for being embarrassing or whatever.
00:46:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:24
Speaker
It was clearly something that usually it was not a public institution, you know, so usually people paid to have family members put in there.
00:46:30
Speaker
So it was something about the ruling class not wanting, like literally putting certain, certain members of their family, like out of sight, out of mind.
00:46:40
Speaker
And many religiously based institutions thought these people were possessed.
00:46:44
Speaker
And so they would engage in exorcisms, bloodletting, and then they experimented with new mechanical devices that were really wild, like really wild.
00:46:55
Speaker
There's like, I mean, wearable cages that I saw people are shackled into like cold, dirty cells and,
00:47:02
Speaker
There's like all these devices that are very medieval.
00:47:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:47:06
Speaker
That very much mirror torture devices.
00:47:08
Speaker
Yeah.
00:47:08
Speaker
But are not quite.
00:47:09
Speaker
So I wonder if they felt they were more humane or something like that.
00:47:13
Speaker
It's so strange to me.
00:47:14
Speaker
It's like, okay, if you think that someone who's like, like, think about how someone who's not sick would respond quickly.
00:47:22
Speaker
to those treatments.
00:47:23
Speaker
Not well.
00:47:24
Speaker
Yeah, not well.
00:47:25
Speaker
So why would you think that someone who's already doing worse than the average person is going to respond well to being harmed further?
00:47:35
Speaker
Seems like it just intuitively makes zero sense.
00:47:39
Speaker
I don't know what's going on.
00:47:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:47:41
Speaker
Well, you know, they wanted to exorcise people of their madness, quote unquote, right?
00:47:46
Speaker
Because they thought it was the act of the devil.
00:47:48
Speaker
Sure.
00:47:49
Speaker
And we saw parallels to this in the Salem Witch Trials in 1693.
00:47:53
Speaker
Right, right, right.
00:47:54
Speaker
This is like a very clear, like, mirror of that with, you know...
00:48:01
Speaker
the Puritans, you know?
00:48:03
Speaker
And often we know that that was like motivated by class and gender as well.
00:48:09
Speaker
Cause you know, conveniently if there was, there was another article where this dude was talking about how conveniently, you know, when people of higher classes had, um,
00:48:19
Speaker
people in their family who were experiencing what they would call witchcraft mania or witchery mania or something like that.
00:48:26
Speaker
All of a sudden that, that was not actually happening.
00:48:29
Speaker
And those people like were kind of like disappeared and like, we're not allowed to come outside, but they were definitely not like targeted for, for hanging.
00:48:38
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:39
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:39
Speaker
For, yeah.
00:48:40
Speaker
It was very much, uh,
00:48:43
Speaker
saved for for poor women and then we then we learned that there was actually a fungus in the in the bread right yeah air got so lsd comes from yeah people were hallucinating my god
00:48:56
Speaker
Something like that I this is like two sides of the same coin, right?
00:49:00
Speaker
Like, so all around the world I'm noticing, like, that spirituality is always a component around what people consider mental illness, but the ways that they were tended to were so different.
00:49:10
Speaker
Like, overwhelmingly Western institutions or Western places were like, this is witchcraft, this is the devil, we need to exercise it, we need to, you know like, one of the people said, well, violent response is required for violent possession.
00:49:25
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:49:26
Speaker
like almost like you beat the demon out of you or something like that.
00:49:30
Speaker
It's just such a stark contrast from, um, and also a means of social control.
00:49:35
Speaker
So it's just a stark contrast from the more expansive ways of being like, um, in like non-Western places where it was more the norm to be like, yes, there's a spiritual component, but these people are gifted or yes, it's a spiritual component, but we care for the people who are struggling, you know, like all of them were spiritually motivated, but took that somewhere else.
00:49:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:53
Speaker
In a more expansive way.
00:49:54
Speaker
As in, these people are part of our community and they are a gift to us.
00:49:59
Speaker
So, you know, this flip-flop.
00:50:03
Speaker
Wild.
00:50:04
Speaker
Anyway, so these institutional models circulated all around Europe, and they used to visit each other comparing tactics and strategies, and it started to be equal parts emulation and competition between nations.
00:50:20
Speaker
Who can provide the best situation in Europe?
00:50:23
Speaker
Not best situation as in the most quality, but the best as in how are we controlling our people, I think.
00:50:30
Speaker
So there was a split in the camps of people who were like, yes, this is exactly how you treat people who are mentally ill.
00:50:41
Speaker
Of course, appropriate.
00:50:45
Speaker
Because they were in the religious camp of like, of course you respond this way to the devil.
00:50:53
Speaker
Sure.
00:50:53
Speaker
Okay.
00:50:55
Speaker
And then others found that the treatment was abhorrent, which...
00:51:00
Speaker
Makes a lot of sense.
00:51:01
Speaker
So there's a shift in the mid-19th century, the first kind of like, I don't know, kind of shift.
00:51:08
Speaker
But there was a coined term, moral treatment is what they called it, by Philippe Pinel, who lived in like the late 1700s, early 1800s.
00:51:18
Speaker
And it was based on the belief that madness, quote unquote, is curable.
00:51:23
Speaker
And so it sought to use the amount of reason available in someone's psyche or whatever to bring the person back to reality.
00:51:31
Speaker
So I think this is like the birthplace maybe of a medical model.
00:51:37
Speaker
Like the idea that like, no, this is not a demonic possession.
00:51:40
Speaker
These people have an illness of the brain, much like a physical ailment that can be cured.
00:51:47
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:51:47
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:51:48
Speaker
And that there's a certain amount of reason that you can harness to bring them back to reality.
00:51:52
Speaker
So this is the basis of quote-unquote moral treatment.
00:51:56
Speaker
And while it's problematic, it was one of the first efforts to see people as people and not... I guess demons.
00:52:05
Speaker
Demons, yeah.
00:52:08
Speaker
Yeah.
00:52:09
Speaker
Yeah, see people as morally inferior, inherently bad or evil because of it.
00:52:17
Speaker
And this is where in the U.S. this is coming closer to the time where the Weston State Hospital kind of comes about.
00:52:26
Speaker
Right.
00:52:27
Speaker
So going to the U.S. in comes Dorothea Dix, who is one of the people who is like she's like the mother of American asylum asylums.
00:52:40
Speaker
And she was one of the people who hated the way that asylums were run.
00:52:44
Speaker
And she lived in early 19th century Boston.
00:52:48
Speaker
She was a nurse.
00:52:49
Speaker
She opened up a school for girls.
00:52:51
Speaker
She taught poor people for free.
00:52:53
Speaker
But she also grew up pretty rough, you know?
00:52:56
Speaker
She had an alcoholic mom.
00:52:58
Speaker
She had an abusive father.
00:53:00
Speaker
And so, you know, she was dealing with a lot of trauma.
00:53:03
Speaker
And she...
00:53:05
Speaker
was very depressed at the time.
00:53:07
Speaker
So she seeks treatment in England.
00:53:10
Speaker
And this is where she meets the Quakers who adopted moral treatment into their practices.
00:53:16
Speaker
And Quakers... Quakers are a mixed bag because I think that they mostly...
00:53:22
Speaker
are they're a white-led group and had a lot of issues but also quakers are credited for coining the term transformative justice oh so more recently wow so you know like do with that what you will but this is the time first time that she experiences something like this she uh enters a quaker run psych facility in europe who it kind of was like this benevolent contrast to the traditional quote-unquote mad
00:53:49
Speaker
house is this place was called toke's retreat and she shortly after returning finds herself in a women's prison i don't know the circumstances i didn't look for into it but she finds herself in a women's prison i don't think she was incarcerated she was like visiting for some reason but she sees incarcerated women struggling with mental illness shackled to the walls in cold cells and she was shocked and
00:54:14
Speaker
and horrified by this.
00:54:15
Speaker
She said, this is inhumane.
00:54:17
Speaker
How are they doing this?
00:54:18
Speaker
And then also she was like, this is such a contrast from the treatment that I got that was actually really helpful in Europe.
00:54:26
Speaker
So she starts visiting like every public and private facility that she can access.
00:54:30
Speaker
She documents the conditions that she found with great detail.
00:54:34
Speaker
And her reports included dramatic accounts of people who were being flogged.
00:54:40
Speaker
They were being starved, chained,
00:54:42
Speaker
physically and sexually abused by their keepers or by the that's what they called their keepers the prison guards i think yeah people who are left naked and without heat or sanitation and she's like this is shocking and it shocked the audience too people didn't know what was happening in prisons at the time either because people just yeah they're they're in isolated places right at
00:55:03
Speaker
general public didn't have access to.
00:55:04
Speaker
Right.
00:55:05
Speaker
Out of sight, out of mind.
00:55:06
Speaker
They didn't put much thought into it.
00:55:08
Speaker
But she really started a movement to try to improve the conditions for people who were imprisoned and people who were deemed clinically, quote unquote, insane.
00:55:17
Speaker
So she began petitioning to open facilities modeled after the retreat that she went to in Europe.
00:55:23
Speaker
She talked to the legislative body that in Massachusetts and in the PBS documentary, they said that, you know, it wasn't permitted for women to make her point.
00:55:33
Speaker
So she relied heavily on men.
00:55:36
Speaker
to get buy-in from men who would then speak on her behalf.
00:55:39
Speaker
Initially, the government rejected it, but many states were really into it.
00:55:42
Speaker
The first place that she convinced to allocate funding towards it was actually Mississippi, and they developed an asylum.
00:55:50
Speaker
And she worked closely with Thomas Kirkbride, who was a Quaker doctor who laid the foundation for what we're going to see as what we know as the asylum.
00:56:01
Speaker
But he believed in really gaudy architecture.
00:56:04
Speaker
He felt like...
00:56:06
Speaker
He really did.
00:56:07
Speaker
He said it played a huge role in helping create a curative environment.
00:56:12
Speaker
He felt like he was cultivating what was a retreat from the outside world.
00:56:18
Speaker
He was building castles for the dispossessed, this documentary was saying.
00:56:23
Speaker
He believed natural light encouraged healing.
00:56:25
Speaker
There were large halls for socializing.
00:56:28
Speaker
There was a lot of occupational therapy.
00:56:30
Speaker
There's rehabilitation with the hope that people could return to be quote unquote productive members of society.
00:56:35
Speaker
So still there's this kind of undercurrent of like, you're here because you need to be fixed.
00:56:40
Speaker
We're going to give you like a really vibey moment here.
00:56:45
Speaker
But hopefully this means that you can start, you know, producing and contributing to the capitalist world.
00:56:54
Speaker
I guess, aspirations of our country.
00:56:59
Speaker
So these were often like palatial buildings.
00:57:01
Speaker
They were designed by prestigious architects with vast landscape grounds and impressive vistas, they said.
00:57:08
Speaker
They were symbolic of civic pride, just like a museum or a university would be.
00:57:14
Speaker
That was what they wanted to frame this as.
00:57:18
Speaker
And some...
00:57:19
Speaker
became fixtures of like a tourist economy pretty immediately so that people could see like, look how great this is.
00:57:25
Speaker
There's an article called From Sanctuary to Snake Pit, The Rise and Fall of Asylums in New Scientist, and it opens with, In the forward of Christopher Payne's book Asylum, Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals, the neurologist Oliver Sacks says that we tend to think of asylums as snake pits, hells of chaos, misery, squalor, and brutality, places that no one would want to stay voluntarily, but asylum started out as a philanthropic dream rather than a psychiatric nightmare.
00:57:51
Speaker
The intention was for asylums to be a place of refuge.
00:57:54
Speaker
Sanctuaries or patients' disorders were recognized and allowed for.
00:57:58
Speaker
Their founders hoped that the mentally ill could be cured by providing them with calming environment, fresh air, varied diet, exercise, jobs in the asylums, workshops or farm, or approach known as quote-unquote moral treatment.
00:58:10
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:58:11
Speaker
I have an addendum.
00:58:12
Speaker
So I also found an article.
00:58:15
Speaker
What's it called?
00:58:16
Speaker
It's on the, on a website called Southern spaces.
00:58:18
Speaker
And it's an article called psychiatry in the wake racism and, and the asylum South by Kylie Smith from Emory and university.
00:58:26
Speaker
Something I want to point out is that a lot of the narratives around the way these started is really generous, right?
00:58:35
Speaker
These are two philanthropic people.
00:58:37
Speaker
They were social reformers.
00:58:38
Speaker
They educated the poor for free.
00:58:41
Speaker
They wanted moral treatment, yada, yada, yada.
00:58:43
Speaker
But this was very much exclusive to white people.
00:58:49
Speaker
There's no evidence to suggest that these people were other than racist.
00:58:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:53
Speaker
you know?
00:58:53
Speaker
And so this idea of humane treatment and also like luxury access was exclusively for white people.
00:59:01
Speaker
Yeah.
00:59:01
Speaker
So it opens with in 1773, the first public institution for the mentally ill in the United States was the Virginia's Eastern Lunatic Asylum.
00:59:11
Speaker
And it was initially a small institution that housed 300 patients where John M. Galt became the superintendent in 1841.
00:59:17
Speaker
And
00:59:19
Speaker
The person who she's citing her work.
00:59:22
Speaker
The person's work that Kylie is citing starts her history of the asylum at this point because Galt took over at a time of reform in the care of mentally ill.
00:59:32
Speaker
And he sought to bring new ideas to the way that the institutions were run.
00:59:36
Speaker
And these ideas quickly placed Galt at the margins of American psychology or psychiatry.
00:59:42
Speaker
because of his attitude towards race.
00:59:45
Speaker
So before the Civil War, Eastern Asylum employed free Black and enslaved people as attendants and staff and admitted both Black and white patients.
00:59:54
Speaker
This is not to be confused with an emancipatory viewpoint.
00:59:59
Speaker
It was just a small place with limited funding, and I think that he felt this was practical.
01:00:03
Speaker
So we're not giving him cookies, but even this stance got him kind of like
01:00:11
Speaker
ousted from he was not liked for this
01:00:14
Speaker
And then they continue to say that for paying white patients, moral therapy usually meant walking or light gardening in outdoor spaces or needlework or carpentry inside.
01:00:25
Speaker
But for black patients, moral therapy meant something else entirely.

Racial and Gender Biases in Asylums

01:00:29
Speaker
And it's here that we learn that the way the mental institutions operated in the wake of slavery, despite Galt's insistence on intermingling, quote unquote, Ghanover, which is the person that they are pulling a lot of this info from,
01:00:42
Speaker
the scholar that centered their work around the Black experience in asylums, shows that Black patients in Virginia's asylums were effectively separated from white patients through demarcations in labor, posing as therapy, along with lines of race and gender.
01:00:58
Speaker
At Eastern Asylum, Black female patients worked in the kitchen and did the laundry, and Black male patients worked in the fields and farm gardens.
01:01:06
Speaker
This was not
01:01:08
Speaker
work as occupational therapy.
01:01:09
Speaker
It was work as day-long back-breaking labor without which the institution would not have existed and the white patients would have gone unfed.
01:01:20
Speaker
So also creating a dynamic in which white patients like are kind of like they could be doing the work for the
01:01:30
Speaker
superintendents and the people who ran, right?
01:01:33
Speaker
Like by creating a hostile environment, the people who were running it didn't have to do much.
01:01:38
Speaker
They just had to say, oh, well, you're not eating today because so-and-so decided they didn't want to work.
01:01:42
Speaker
Yeah.
01:01:43
Speaker
Right, right, right.
01:01:44
Speaker
You know?
01:01:45
Speaker
So they describe how Galt used enslaved people to care for both black and white patients, again, reflecting patterns of healing relationships that existed on the plantation and
01:01:57
Speaker
In this article, I guess they're talking about, like, communities of care that existed within, like, between enslaved black folks to each other.
01:02:06
Speaker
Yeah.
01:02:08
Speaker
While living in these horrifying conditions.
01:02:11
Speaker
And that was reflected in these asylums as well.
01:02:13
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:02:14
Speaker
While Galt did not believe that African Americans were equal to white people in terms of intelligence or emotion, he defended his work.
01:02:22
Speaker
He defended the work of the black staff, who he felt were just as capable, quote unquote, of providing excellent care to his patients.
01:02:28
Speaker
Really, this was just a way to circumvent extra costs.
01:02:31
Speaker
Right.
01:02:31
Speaker
Yeah.
01:02:32
Speaker
This brought him into direct conflict with other psychiatrists, in particular, Thomas Kirkbride.
01:02:38
Speaker
Oh, yes.
01:02:39
Speaker
Who was a Pennsylvania physician at the vanguard of a movement to reform and modernize psychiatric institutions.
01:02:46
Speaker
Kirkbride's large and rambling architectural designs were based on the segregation of patients by gender, race and diagnostic criteria.
01:02:54
Speaker
Yeah.
01:02:55
Speaker
He argued publicly with Galt that it was entirely unsuitable for Black patients to be housed alongside white patients or enslaved people to be used as carers.
01:03:06
Speaker
Kirkbride's concern was for the reputation of the psychiatric institution.
01:03:11
Speaker
His mission was to sell his new asylum plans to potential buyers, i.e.
01:03:16
Speaker
state governments concerned with white
01:03:18
Speaker
respectability, i.e.
01:03:19
Speaker
those giant, whatever, palatial spaces.
01:03:23
Speaker
As Galt gave up trying to convince psychiatry's professional bodies of his methods, efficacy and exploration of race relations shifts the lens onto intersections of religion and gender.
01:03:36
Speaker
The science of the causes of mental illness in the 19th century were hardly precise, obviously.
01:03:41
Speaker
Garniver explores how Galt and his contemporaries were concerned with
01:03:46
Speaker
As they described it, sensory overstimulation, often taking the forms of excessive religious feeling or female hysteria.
01:03:53
Speaker
Psychiatry's concern with religious excitement formed a part of the large effort to establish scientific knowledge and expertise in the place of folk belief considered superstition, especially in the South in the wake of slavery.
01:04:08
Speaker
This played out in different ways for black and white patients and differently again for men and women.
01:04:13
Speaker
As Charlefette and other historians have shown, physicians throughout the U.S. were keen to replace traditional healing practices of enslaved Africans as well as the Catholic religiosity of Irish immigrants with what passed for modern scientific rationale.
01:04:29
Speaker
Those deemed excessively religious were barely delineated from the mentally ill in the 1800s, and they were frequently
01:04:37
Speaker
admitted to Galt's asylum.
01:04:39
Speaker
So I thought that that was really notable, the way that you're going to start using religion as a means of social control and telling people that they are possessed and then to dispossess and dehumanize and harm them.
01:04:54
Speaker
But then in this iteration, because, quote unquote, scientific inquiry, we'll talk about this later, but I feel like you could use it to push eugenics and you could use it to justify the
01:05:06
Speaker
um incarceration they like switch the narratives you know and then it was a way to also like shut down solidarity movements and kind of like intra-community empowerment via spiritual practices because like what i'm also seeing in between these lines is like
01:05:23
Speaker
There is like a large, there was like a long lineage of like enslaved black folks sustaining hoodoo and voodoo traditions under the guise of Catholicism.
01:05:32
Speaker
Sure.
01:05:32
Speaker
So you could like keep practicing while also not being like targeted for doing that.
01:05:39
Speaker
And what I'm seeing here is that both of those things were being targeted as like religious extremism.
01:05:46
Speaker
Yeah.
01:05:46
Speaker
And that could put you in an asylum.
01:05:49
Speaker
Effectively shutting down any movement or healing practices that were available through them.
01:05:53
Speaker
And so, anyways, I thought that that was really notable.
01:05:56
Speaker
And I'm gonna shut the fuck up, because I've been talking a lot.
01:06:00
Speaker
But what I wanted to say is that these places, one, racist and sexist and all this stuff in its origins, and...
01:06:10
Speaker
They were meant to be like really lush, vibrant, luxurious places for profit.
01:06:15
Speaker
No more than 250 patients at a time.
01:06:17
Speaker
And by 1880, there was like 139 asylums built across the United States.
01:06:23
Speaker
But the political social context of this time greatly increased the need of these facilities and they became overrun, which I'm going to give this back to you to talk about how that shows up at the...
01:06:34
Speaker
Western State.
01:06:35
Speaker
Thank you for sharing all that information.
01:06:37
Speaker
I feel like, yeah, a lot of it will tie into the stuff that I'm about to share.
01:06:42
Speaker
Okay.
01:06:44
Speaker
So I'm going to take it back to and talk about...
01:06:48
Speaker
The history of the land of West Virginia first.
01:06:53
Speaker
So very similar to what we talked about in the last episode, there was technically an official state position that there were no indigenous people when the white settlers arrived.
01:07:06
Speaker
But that is not true.
01:07:09
Speaker
Why do they say that, don't they?
01:07:10
Speaker
They really do.
01:07:10
Speaker
They're like, we can just say whatever we want.
01:07:13
Speaker
But according to Wheeling Heritage Museum coordinator Travis Henline, one tribe that had a presence along the Ohio River were the Shawnee.
01:07:24
Speaker
And that is talking about the late 17th century through the 18th century.
01:07:28
Speaker
And the first European settlers to colonize this area were the French settlers.
01:07:33
Speaker
There was also a group of tribes from the Northeast known as the Iroquois Notion.
01:07:40
Speaker
And the Delaware tribe also lived in this area, but were pushed out the Eastern Panhandle by the late 1700s.
01:07:49
Speaker
Seneca and Mohawk tribes lived in north-central West Virginia near Morgantown, and the earlier history of southern West Virginia is less known.
01:07:59
Speaker
And some experts say that they were connected to the Cherokee tribe, while others say that they weren't.
01:08:07
Speaker
In 1818, the land where West Virginia exists was called Preston.
01:08:13
Speaker
In 1818, the land where West Virginia was called Preston, and then it was called Fleshersville.
01:08:24
Speaker
And then in 1819 was when it was decided it was going to be Weston.
01:08:27
Speaker
And then it was incorporated in 1846.
01:08:30
Speaker
A fun fact about West Virginia is that the Museum of American Glass exists there.
01:08:37
Speaker
They have 20,000 pieces of glass on display.
01:08:40
Speaker
Okay.
01:08:42
Speaker
So the asylum was created just a few years after the town was incorporated in the early 1850s.
01:08:52
Speaker
It was authorized by the Virginia General Assembly as the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum at 71 Asylum Drive, and it's actually 666 acres large.
01:09:05
Speaker
Okay.
01:09:08
Speaker
Did you know that?
01:09:09
Speaker
No, it's huge.
01:09:10
Speaker
Yeah.
01:09:10
Speaker
I mean, huge also 666.
01:09:12
Speaker
Well, didn't they say that that's not actually the number?
01:09:15
Speaker
Apparently, that's a lie, the mark of the beast.
01:09:18
Speaker
Yeah, I don't believe that it's like an evil number.
01:09:20
Speaker
But it is.
01:09:21
Speaker
Well, I mean, no, apparently it's a lie that 666 is the number, you know, just like Jesus' birthday is not actually.
01:09:27
Speaker
Yes, yes.
01:09:29
Speaker
I also don't believe in the, you know.
01:09:31
Speaker
evilness of the 666 number but the asylum is 666 acres large and it spans a quarter mile from end to end fun fact
01:09:44
Speaker
It is the largest hand-cut stone building in America, second largest in the world.
01:09:51
Speaker
I don't know why that is necessary for an asylum, but yeah.
01:09:54
Speaker
And then, as Shana mentioned, it is built with the Kirkbride Plan in mind, and it was built in 1858 by architect Richard Andrews, and it was constructed using prison and enslaved people labor.
01:10:11
Speaker
Yeah, that's... Yeah.
01:10:13
Speaker
But then later, stonemasons from Europe came.
01:10:17
Speaker
to lay down the stones as well.
01:10:21
Speaker
In 1861, the outbreak of the Civil War resulted in a diversion of funds, and so there was a delay in construction.
01:10:28
Speaker
And it was actually used by the Union infantry during this period of time.
01:10:32
Speaker
And then in 1862, construction was resumed by the reorganized government of Virginia.
01:10:40
Speaker
And in 1863, it was renamed the West Virginia Hospital following the admission of West Virginia into the U.S.,
01:10:47
Speaker
In 1864, this is when the first patients were admitted into the hospital, but the construction was still taking place until 1881.
01:10:55
Speaker
So for the first 20 years that was in actively a hospital, it was also still being built.
01:11:04
Speaker
There was a clock tower that was 200 feet tall that was completed in 1871.
01:11:09
Speaker
And this insane asylum did also have black patients, but they were segregated.
01:11:16
Speaker
So probably very similar, maybe even worse than what you just talked about.
01:11:21
Speaker
I couldn't find any detailed information, but, you know, being built with Kirk Bride's plan in mind, I doubt that it was any better than what you were talking about.
01:11:34
Speaker
Yeah, for sure.
01:11:35
Speaker
Because he had... Yeah, he was against this other dude.
01:11:39
Speaker
He was, yes.
01:11:39
Speaker
Sorry.
01:11:41
Speaker
He was against the other problematic dude.
01:11:42
Speaker
Yeah.
01:11:44
Speaker
So it was its own community.
01:11:45
Speaker
It had a vegetable garden, a dairy works, a gas works, a water works.
01:11:51
Speaker
And it had three cemeteries.
01:11:53
Speaker
Three cemeteries on the grounds.
01:11:57
Speaker
Designated for the purpose of dying patients?
01:12:01
Speaker
I guess so.
01:12:02
Speaker
I don't know what else it would be for, right?
01:12:04
Speaker
It had an apothecary that at a certain point of time, different points of time dispensed cannabis, heroin, and bourbon as medicines.
01:12:13
Speaker
And oftentimes patients were given work or tasks for a quote, sense of accomplishment also as a way to reduce paid stuff.
01:12:21
Speaker
Okay.
01:12:23
Speaker
Interestingly, there's a chapel also on the grounds that currently has been used multiple times by the local high school for prom location.
01:12:33
Speaker
What?
01:12:34
Speaker
No!
01:12:36
Speaker
What's wrong with them?
01:12:38
Speaker
I'm not sure.
01:12:38
Speaker
I feel like they're just trying to use the, like, capitalize on the location as much as possible right now, which, you know, I'll get to later.
01:12:46
Speaker
The upper floors included living areas for the patients, doctors and nurses.
01:12:49
Speaker
And, you know, it was conceived with good intentions and high ideals is what one article I read.
01:12:55
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:13:21
Speaker
Now I'm going to talk about why people came here.
01:13:24
Speaker
So like reasons that they were committed.
01:13:26
Speaker
And it's important to keep in mind that there wasn't, the DSM didn't exist at this point.
01:13:31
Speaker
And there wasn't like a agreement across the board on like why people would be sent to asylums.
01:13:38
Speaker
And like, there wasn't consensus on,
01:13:42
Speaker
diagnosis and what that actually meant.
01:13:45
Speaker
So reasons why people were sent to this asylum, which I'm guessing is similar to other asylums across the board.
01:13:52
Speaker
Here are some.
01:13:53
Speaker
They weren't just sent here for reasons of mental illness.
01:13:56
Speaker
People could be sent here for having asthma, epilepsy, dementia, tuberculosis, addiction, some weirder ones, seduction, egotism, bad whiskey,
01:14:09
Speaker
Bad whiskey?
01:14:09
Speaker
I don't even know what that means.
01:14:10
Speaker
Like, they drank bad whiskey?
01:14:12
Speaker
I'm not sure.
01:14:14
Speaker
Indigestion.
01:14:15
Speaker
Doubt about his mother's ancestors.
01:14:18
Speaker
What the hell?
01:14:20
Speaker
What does that mean?
01:14:22
Speaker
Loss of arm.
01:14:24
Speaker
Menstrual derangement, which I'm like... PMS?
01:14:28
Speaker
Yeah.
01:14:29
Speaker
Childbirth.
01:14:30
Speaker
Disappointed in love.
01:14:33
Speaker
So, like, heartbreak.
01:14:33
Speaker
Heartbreak?
01:14:35
Speaker
Death of sons in war.
01:14:37
Speaker
So, like, grief.
01:14:38
Speaker
Okay.
01:14:39
Speaker
Overstudy of religion, which you just talked about.
01:14:42
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
01:14:43
Speaker
Domestic trouble.
01:14:45
Speaker
Domestic violence?
01:14:46
Speaker
Domestic trouble is what it says.
01:14:49
Speaker
Laziness, snuff eating for two years, reading too many novels.
01:14:54
Speaker
Wow.
01:14:55
Speaker
So I'll get to that.
01:14:56
Speaker
Masturbation.
01:14:58
Speaker
Which I found this quote from Dr. Turner H.R.
01:15:04
Speaker
Smith, who was a doctor at Fulton State Hospital in Missouri, who said, I very much fear this pernicious habit with all its withering influence upon the mind and body prevails among the young of both sexes to an alarming extent.
01:15:18
Speaker
Okay.
01:15:19
Speaker
The expenditure and exhaustion of nerve power resulting from the frequent repetition of this habit and the constant excitation to which the brain is thus exposed slowly and permanently damage the delicate nerve cells, the supreme centers of life, and so wreck the unfortunate subjects physically and mentally as renders them as the saddest of the hopeless.
01:15:43
Speaker
Oh my god!
01:15:45
Speaker
Yeah.
01:15:47
Speaker
That is the most dramatic description and longest description of masturbation I've ever heard.
01:15:53
Speaker
And all of that is like 100% false.
01:15:57
Speaker
All of that.
01:15:57
Speaker
I mean, obviously.
01:15:58
Speaker
Masturbation is actually very good for your health.
01:16:00
Speaker
That's true.
01:16:01
Speaker
It is.
01:16:01
Speaker
And didn't they prescribe that to hysteria patients, you know?
01:16:04
Speaker
Yes.
01:16:04
Speaker
Pick it, pick it.
01:16:05
Speaker
Yes.
01:16:07
Speaker
Pick a solution.
01:16:07
Speaker
You can look up, like, Planned Parenthood.
01:16:10
Speaker
They have a document that's on, like, the stigma and history of masturbation.
01:16:14
Speaker
And they talk about, actually, the true science behind masturbation and how it's helpful.
01:16:20
Speaker
If you're curious.
01:16:22
Speaker
They said pleasure is liberating.
01:16:24
Speaker
Yeah.
01:16:24
Speaker
You don't need to be doing that.
01:16:25
Speaker
Exactly.
01:16:26
Speaker
Also, who is this person?
01:16:27
Speaker
When was the last time they had an orgasm?
01:16:28
Speaker
I know.
01:16:29
Speaker
Dr. Turner, H.R.
01:16:31
Speaker
Smith.
01:16:31
Speaker
Or maybe, like, they were scared of how good they felt, you know.
01:16:35
Speaker
Maybe.
01:16:35
Speaker
You know, when you're a Christian person, you just associate a lot of things with, like, sin because you're like, my existence is sinful.
01:16:43
Speaker
What if they were like, I'm masturbating and I'm thinking about someone I should not be attracted to.
01:16:47
Speaker
Sure, sure.
01:16:48
Speaker
Therefore, it's all bad and nobody should do it and it's evil and whatever.
01:16:53
Speaker
yeah i mean that was that's a lot but it was actually one of the most common causes for admission into any mental institutions that's that's a hilarious description i know i know that's why i needed to share it um but some other ones disappointed affection huh imaginary female trouble what the f i hate it medicine to prevent conception i don't know if that's like this person took
01:17:18
Speaker
Medicine to prevent conception.
01:17:19
Speaker
And so they were being sent here.
01:17:21
Speaker
Time of life.
01:17:22
Speaker
I don't know what that means.
01:17:23
Speaker
Like menopause.
01:17:25
Speaker
Or maybe like getting old.
01:17:27
Speaker
Yeah.
01:17:28
Speaker
I don't know.
01:17:29
Speaker
So you get sent to an asylum after a certain age.
01:17:33
Speaker
And then there was also desertion of husband.
01:17:36
Speaker
And also husbands could send people here because their wives were talking back to them.
01:17:43
Speaker
There's like a really long list that they actually have.
01:17:47
Speaker
Like, if you go to visit this place, they have a list of, like, reasons for admission, and some of the ones that I listed are on there.
01:17:54
Speaker
But there's also, like, greediness, gunshot wound, rumor of husband murder.
01:17:59
Speaker
Political excitement.
01:18:01
Speaker
Politics!
01:18:02
Speaker
Just politics!
01:18:05
Speaker
Bad company.
01:18:09
Speaker
Deranged masturbation, not just regular masturbation.
01:18:11
Speaker
What does that mean?
01:18:12
Speaker
Deranged masturbation.
01:18:14
Speaker
Female disease, whatever the heck that means.
01:18:17
Speaker
So you can see why somehow, you know, the number got really out of hand from like 250.
01:18:24
Speaker
Yeah.
01:18:27
Speaker
to like way more later on when people were being institutionalized and committed for all of these reasons.
01:18:33
Speaker
So I found this like really good article in Time magazine written by Kate Moore in 2021 called Silencing Women Through Psychiatry.
01:18:43
Speaker
So I wanted to touch back on, you know, the
01:18:45
Speaker
oh, women were getting institutionalized for talking back to their husbands.
01:18:50
Speaker
And yeah, she says in 19th century psychiatry, women being independent was seen as quote madness.
01:19:00
Speaker
And she tells a story of Elizabeth, who was a housewife and a mother of six, who stood up to her domineering husband.
01:19:08
Speaker
I don't know what that means.
01:19:09
Speaker
You know, like maybe he was an abusive person.
01:19:12
Speaker
Right.
01:19:14
Speaker
And what use of language?
01:19:15
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
01:19:16
Speaker
And she wrote in a record of defense of her sanity while she was in an asylum.
01:19:23
Speaker
I, though a woman, have just a good a right to my opinion as my husband has to his.
01:19:30
Speaker
But assertive women in those days, Kate Moore writes, were swiftly dispatched to asylums, institutionalized for causing, quote, the greatest annoyances to the family.
01:19:39
Speaker
Wow.
01:19:40
Speaker
And for defying, quote, all domestic control.
01:19:43
Speaker
So she was locked, locked up in Jacksonville, Jacksonville Insane Asylum in Illinois.
01:19:51
Speaker
Oh, that was the asylum that I was talking about, that, like, Kirk Bride... Oh, didn't like?
01:19:59
Speaker
No, he debuted.
01:20:01
Speaker
Oh, okay.
01:20:02
Speaker
Yeah.
01:20:02
Speaker
Interesting.
01:20:03
Speaker
Well, that's where Elizabeth was locked up.
01:20:06
Speaker
That place was fucked.
01:20:08
Speaker
He... Clearly, her husband was just, like, not wanting to deal with her anymore, and when he looked into it, he found that he could arrange his wife's committal simply by request of husband.
01:20:19
Speaker
So, like, literally...
01:20:20
Speaker
All you needed to do was like, I want to come in with my wife and you didn't have to like give them proof of anything.
01:20:26
Speaker
You could just do that.
01:20:29
Speaker
Specifically in this case, without the evidence of insanity required in other cases.
01:20:34
Speaker
She said, my husband placed me in this insane asylum, fully determined.
01:20:38
Speaker
I should have a thorough dressing down or breaking in before he should take me out.
01:20:41
Speaker
So like teach her a lesson, essentially make her submissive.
01:20:45
Speaker
I hate men.
01:20:46
Speaker
I know.
01:20:47
Speaker
Fucked up.
01:20:48
Speaker
She said that many of her fellow patients were also what she calls sane, but had been at the asylum for years.
01:20:55
Speaker
One guilty of extreme jealousy was halfway through a 16-year incarceration.
01:21:00
Speaker
16.
01:21:02
Speaker
For extreme jealousy.
01:21:04
Speaker
Some of the people she was with also had been committed for reading novels, for hard study, and
01:21:13
Speaker
And for insane behavior during change of life, which was related to a woman's menstrual cycle.
01:21:19
Speaker
period-related madness was commonplace that doctors encouraged mothers to delay the onset of their daughter's menses by making them take cold baths and abstain from meat and novels.
01:21:30
Speaker
Oh my gosh.
01:21:32
Speaker
This is very yellow wallpaper.
01:21:33
Speaker
I know.
01:21:34
Speaker
I mean, that's clearly rooted in some history, right?
01:21:38
Speaker
But basically, assertive, ambitious women were seen as unnatural and so mad and insane.
01:21:44
Speaker
Of course.
01:21:44
Speaker
One doctor...
01:21:46
Speaker
in 1858 visited a girls' school and he said, you seem to be training your girls for the lunatic asylum because they were just like being educated.
01:21:56
Speaker
Because women who studied or read or had like opinions and minds of their own were seen as unnatural and going morally insane because they were going against what women were supposed to be doing.
01:22:10
Speaker
Wow.
01:22:11
Speaker
chloroform and ether were used to quiet them.
01:22:14
Speaker
My god.
01:22:16
Speaker
And it was standard to use straight jackets on women more often than men in the asylums.
01:22:22
Speaker
And doctors claimed a 70% success rate.
01:22:24
Speaker
Not success rate.
01:22:26
Speaker
Basically, they were just, like, you know, abusing them to make them submit.
01:22:31
Speaker
Yeah.
01:22:32
Speaker
And the only way to make all of this abuse stop was to submit, you know, and just become docile and become quiet.
01:22:40
Speaker
Oh my god, you know what?
01:22:43
Speaker
I'm just thinking about like, what did women need to be?
01:22:47
Speaker
Like, what did white women need to be to not be insane?
01:22:51
Speaker
Right.
01:22:52
Speaker
And what did you have to relinquish?
01:22:55
Speaker
And what ideals did you have to like absorb or believe in or whatever?
01:23:02
Speaker
to, like, keep it moving, not incarcerated in these and not to die in them.
01:23:07
Speaker
Right.
01:23:08
Speaker
And not just be, like, abused and have, like, all of your freedom taken away, essentially, to, like, kind of choose your pick your battles, you know?
01:23:17
Speaker
I mean and I don't know.
01:23:18
Speaker
How does this then, like, devolve into, like, the current state of, like, Karens, for example, where now, obviously, people are not willy-nilly being put in
01:23:30
Speaker
in these particular situations in that way.
01:23:33
Speaker
But like, I'm just wondering like, what kind of violent, oppressive internalization did you have to inherit for you to still be able to be here?
01:23:44
Speaker
Like how many of these women just fucking died in these institutions or were sterilized and couldn't reproduce?
01:23:49
Speaker
Right, right.
01:23:50
Speaker
Exactly.
01:23:51
Speaker
Yeah.
01:23:51
Speaker
Exactly.

Women's Emotions and Psychiatry

01:23:52
Speaker
Yeah, it's messed up.
01:23:54
Speaker
Kate Moore says, every genuine emotion have to be stifled.
01:23:58
Speaker
every act of difference from society's prescribed model of femininity had to be suppressed.
01:24:03
Speaker
Elizabeth could not display her anger at what had happened or even a hint at hatred for her husband because her psychiatrist was always watching.
01:24:11
Speaker
And any unladylike emotion, whatever the heck that means, would justify continued incarceration.
01:24:18
Speaker
Women who had ungovernable personalities and strong resolution were literally textbook examples of female insanity at this time.
01:24:28
Speaker
Yeah, she wrote of the breaking in she experienced while she was at the asylum.
01:24:34
Speaker
I think it will be a long time before this cure will be affected.
01:24:38
Speaker
Determined to remain true to herself, she wrote, God grant that the time may never wear away in me the spirit of resistance.
01:24:46
Speaker
So she kept trying to just like, you know, stand her ground.
01:24:49
Speaker
evil even while she was there the the person who wrote this article was like comparing it to like now you know in the ways in which you know women are still marked as like crazy when they come out sharing experiences of abuse sure i mean i'm just thinking about like the weaponization though also of like of like white women's emotionality because clearly in some cases it was completely acceptable right to do that yeah
01:25:19
Speaker
Like the way that in the name of white women's fragility and fear and temper tantrums, violence was done unto black men.
01:25:32
Speaker
And so in those particular instances, all of a sudden it's not hysteria.
01:25:36
Speaker
All of a sudden it's a warranted emotional response because it helps maintain structural order.
01:25:42
Speaker
But if there's any type of emotion that...
01:25:46
Speaker
Like moves in a different direction against someone who has more power.
01:25:50
Speaker
Like their husbands, for example.
01:25:52
Speaker
Then all of a sudden it's they're crazy.
01:25:54
Speaker
Yeah.
01:25:55
Speaker
Yeah.
01:25:55
Speaker
I mean, it's all about social control.
01:25:56
Speaker
100%.
01:25:57
Speaker
Yeah.
01:25:58
Speaker
The last thing I'll say is that in 1860, Elizabeth wrote, the worst that my enemies can do, they have done and I fear them no more.
01:26:07
Speaker
I am now free to be true and honest.
01:26:09
Speaker
This woman crushing machinery works the wrong way.
01:26:13
Speaker
The true woman shines brighter and brighter under the process instead of being strangled.
01:26:17
Speaker
I don't know how true that is.
01:26:18
Speaker
She clearly had a response to being incarcerated that not everyone do.
01:26:24
Speaker
We do push the narrative that resiliency is measured by how much we suffer.
01:26:30
Speaker
Yes.
01:26:30
Speaker
And are able to be okay under situations of extreme abuse and suffering, which I don't agree with us what resiliency means.
01:26:39
Speaker
Bringing it back to Weston State Hospital, most common reasons why people were being institutionalized were chronic dementia, acute mania, melancholia, and
01:26:51
Speaker
Depression, probably.
01:26:53
Speaker
Chronic mania.
01:26:54
Speaker
But also most common was those, quote, not assigned a cause.
01:26:57
Speaker
So they were just like there for on record, no reason.
01:27:01
Speaker
The way they would have trapped my ass.
01:27:03
Speaker
The way they would have trapped my ass.
01:27:05
Speaker
Melancholia.
01:27:06
Speaker
Yeah, you sad bitch.
01:27:07
Speaker
Yeah.
01:27:08
Speaker
Get in here.
01:27:09
Speaker
I mean, for more than one of these.
01:27:11
Speaker
Yes.
01:27:11
Speaker
I would have gotten laziness, menstrual derangement.
01:27:15
Speaker
Absolutely.
01:27:16
Speaker
Menstrual derangement.
01:27:17
Speaker
You know what?
01:27:18
Speaker
I'm going to start using that.
01:27:19
Speaker
Disappointed love.
01:27:19
Speaker
Oh, my gosh.
01:27:20
Speaker
I'm... Seduction.
01:27:22
Speaker
I'm currently experiencing menstrual derangement.
01:27:25
Speaker
I'm going to need a week off of work.
01:27:27
Speaker
Oh, my gosh.
01:27:28
Speaker
Oh, my gosh.
01:27:29
Speaker
Oh, my gosh.
01:27:31
Speaker
So by 1880, which was about 20 years after the hospital opened, there were 750 patients already, 500 more than the maximum amount of 250.
01:27:46
Speaker
And a board of directors report around that time said that 467 white patients and 24 black patients as young as eight and as old as 93.
01:27:55
Speaker
Yeah.
01:27:57
Speaker
Oh no, babies.
01:27:58
Speaker
Yeah.
01:27:59
Speaker
Yeah.
01:28:00
Speaker
They were probably just being kids.
01:28:01
Speaker
Yeah.
01:28:02
Speaker
Yeah.
01:28:03
Speaker
Okay.

Life in Asylums and Overpopulation Issues

01:28:04
Speaker
Sad.
01:28:05
Speaker
A lot of this I pulled from a graduate thesis that Kim Jacks wrote in 2008 about Weston State Hospital.
01:28:14
Speaker
Shout out, Kim.
01:28:15
Speaker
Your thesis is being used.
01:28:17
Speaker
Exactly.
01:28:18
Speaker
So from that thesis, I found that she quotes a 1907 booklet of employee rules and regulations for the hospital, reveals some interesting facts about kind of the day-to-day in the hospital and what it was like for the employees.
01:28:34
Speaker
Quote, most employees resided at the hospital.
01:28:36
Speaker
Attendance rose at 5.45 a.m.
01:28:38
Speaker
and opened the patient's rooms, got them ready for breakfast,
01:28:41
Speaker
then acted as waiters in the dining room and kept watch while the patients ate.
01:28:46
Speaker
They had to collect all the knives and other cutlery and count them before the patients left the dining room.
01:28:50
Speaker
Attendants had to clean up the wards, control the patients without use of profanity or violence, except in the case, in the clearest case of self-defense.
01:29:00
Speaker
So this was in 1907.
01:29:01
Speaker
So it was like way before there was the hospital was overrun.
01:29:06
Speaker
So this is like closer to like the ideals that they hoped that the asylum would be living up to.
01:29:14
Speaker
Mechanical restraints or isolation could be used only with a physician's approval.
01:29:19
Speaker
Attendants were to keep the patients clean, change their bedding weekly, make sure they bathe.
01:29:23
Speaker
One attendant was to be in the hall with the patients at all times.
01:29:27
Speaker
And they were also to provide amusement and entertainment for the patients like dances, church services and other activities.
01:29:34
Speaker
Employees were to engage in card playing only during their time off or if it was to benefit the patients.
01:29:40
Speaker
And they retired to their rooms at 10 p.m.
01:29:43
Speaker
So a super long shift.
01:29:44
Speaker
It's like 6 a.m.
01:29:45
Speaker
to 10 p.m.
01:29:46
Speaker
Unless given special permission to be out till 1130.
01:29:50
Speaker
So they all lived here, too.
01:29:52
Speaker
These were extensive considering the small pay that they were receiving.
01:29:56
Speaker
And they were also living at the hospital.
01:29:58
Speaker
And though, you know, that...
01:30:00
Speaker
It was a financial help in some ways, but since they didn't have to pay rent, it was still wearing on the employees to just be there all of the time.
01:30:07
Speaker
There were other employees on the campus as well that were engineers, carpenters, farm laborers, bakers, painters, florists, and more.
01:30:15
Speaker
So this was in about 1907.
01:30:18
Speaker
I found some info on the historical context that was happening at the time that this asylum was getting off the ground as well as many others.
01:30:29
Speaker
And like we're sitting in post-Civil War era, right?
01:30:32
Speaker
Where people are like suffering from PTSD hard.
01:30:35
Speaker
And so, like, one of the reasons why the asylum was becoming so populated, overpopulated, was the heightened need due to war.
01:30:46
Speaker
And then there's also this era of reform, which marks the rise of industrialization and urbanization.
01:30:52
Speaker
And the rise of asylums also parallels rises in orphanages, quote-unquote poor houses and prisons.
01:30:58
Speaker
So all of them were experiencing increased populations.
01:31:03
Speaker
And, you know...
01:31:05
Speaker
There is this makes sense because there is an increased demand for cheap labor.
01:31:08
Speaker
So people were not getting paid.
01:31:09
Speaker
They were being overworked.
01:31:11
Speaker
They were having children work.
01:31:14
Speaker
Companies were monopolizing markets.
01:31:16
Speaker
And so the access to work and who got all the money was very much saturated in one area.
01:31:22
Speaker
This created a lot of corrupt business practices to sustain the consumers.
01:31:26
Speaker
There were no regulations.
01:31:28
Speaker
There was inhumane treatment for workers, no healthcare.
01:31:31
Speaker
And something that I found about the Kirkbride's first place in Jackson, the one that that woman stayed at, was that a lot of the people were admitted there because they had very, very poor nutrition, vitamin deficiencies that have impacts on the brain.
01:31:46
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:31:46
Speaker
And a lot of the farmers in the area grew crops that they couldn't eat.
01:31:50
Speaker
Mostly it was black farmers who were growing cotton.
01:31:54
Speaker
So they weren't getting paid a lot.
01:31:57
Speaker
And they were depending on getting nutrition from what they could afford to buy, which was often just cornmeal.
01:32:01
Speaker
So overwhelmingly, people were experiencing a vitamin B deficiency called pellagra, and it's connected to dementia and can induce psychosis.
01:32:12
Speaker
And yeah, so there's this piece, this like structural inequality, poverty, creating food scarcity and food deserts for certain people who then were admitted because they couldn't get what they needed.
01:32:26
Speaker
And instead of being offered a nutritional, like nutritional food, they were just offered this inhumane treatment, which kept people in longer because people are not going to get better.
01:32:35
Speaker
Yeah.
01:32:36
Speaker
And they may die.
01:32:37
Speaker
Yeah.
01:32:38
Speaker
With that kind of vitamin deficiency.
01:32:40
Speaker
Also, a quarter of the asylum members had syphilis.
01:32:43
Speaker
So, like, syphilis-induced psychosis.
01:32:45
Speaker
Right, right, right.
01:32:46
Speaker
And then, like, you know, you talked about other conditions, including mania, quote-unquote worry, and nymphomania, which, yeah.
01:32:54
Speaker
And then apparently at this place, you could be admitted if a family member said you were insane and two physicians backed it up.
01:32:59
Speaker
And then I think I took some notes on, I guess, kind of an addendum to women being overly...
01:33:07
Speaker
Like incarcerated at higher rates than men.
01:33:09
Speaker
This article that I cited earlier on racism in asylums was talking about how this was also it was gendered, but it was also racialized.
01:33:19
Speaker
And they say that the asylum expressively denied women's authority in religious matters, paid inordinate attention to female reproductive organs as the cause of insanity, and promoted a racialized vision of healthy womanhood that ignored the trauma of abuse.
01:33:33
Speaker
Yeah.
01:33:33
Speaker
Yeah.
01:33:44
Speaker
medical and political discourse that portrayed black women as naturally promiscuous.
01:33:48
Speaker
So there's this, so when you were saying like seduction, I'm feeling like that's very much tied to these, the beginnings of this narrative that would then lead into a eugenics conversation.
01:34:00
Speaker
Anyways.
01:34:02
Speaker
I think it's interesting how it's like, there's like, you talk about attention to female reproductive organs as a cause of insanity, but also like,
01:34:11
Speaker
there's like a narrative around like women are here to reproduce as well.
01:34:19
Speaker
Right.
01:34:20
Speaker
Right.
01:34:20
Speaker
It's just like, get your story straight.
01:34:23
Speaker
Well, if they can say that the reproductive organs was the cause of insanity, but also we need them to be like vessels for reproduction, then it makes sense that the only way to relate to those people is to control them.
01:34:41
Speaker
So whatever.
01:34:42
Speaker
I'm just like, what in the world?

Conclusion & Listener Engagement

01:34:48
Speaker
Hello!
01:34:50
Speaker
Thank you for getting this far in our episode on the West End State Hospital.
01:34:56
Speaker
If this feels incomplete, it's because it is.
01:34:59
Speaker
There was so much information about this hospital and also the history of asylums as we know it that we decided to break it up into two parts.
01:35:08
Speaker
So we hope you'll stay tuned for part two.
01:35:11
Speaker
There we'll be talking about the evolution of American psychiatry and
01:35:15
Speaker
including the development of mental disorder classifications, the popularization of the lobotomy, and impacts of deinstitutionalization.
01:35:24
Speaker
We'll also let you know what's up with Weston State today and discuss disability justice movements.
01:35:31
Speaker
So if you are curious and you are not following us yet on Spotify or wherever you're listening, please, please do subscribe and
01:35:41
Speaker
Um, you can also go find us on Instagram at unpacking the eerie, and there's a place where you can choose to be notified that we posted something new.
01:35:54
Speaker
And every time we release something, we update it on our Instagram.
01:35:58
Speaker
So
01:35:59
Speaker
Also, while I have your attention, if I still have your attention, there is a new feature on Spotify where you can leave a comment underneath the episodes themselves.
01:36:11
Speaker
And it's public, so whatever you post, other people will be able to see as well.
01:36:15
Speaker
But we would love to hear what's going on in your brains as you're listening, the questions that come up, the opinions, gaps in knowledge that we just...
01:36:27
Speaker
missed or tangents that we didn't get to follow.
01:36:31
Speaker
Every time I talk to someone who has listened, usually within my friend circle, there's so much richness in those conversations and I learn so much and I ponder so much.
01:36:44
Speaker
Folks are always bringing the new nuances to us.
01:36:50
Speaker
So if you're feeling generous and opinionated, yeah, we'd love to hear anything you have to share, even retroactively about any of the topics that we've covered.
01:37:04
Speaker
Okay, that's it.
01:37:06
Speaker
Thank you so much for listening and promise part two will be coming out very, very soon.
01:37:13
Speaker
Thanks for listening and for supporting us.
01:37:16
Speaker
You can find us on Instagram and Facebook at Unpacking the Eerie, on Twitter at Unpack the Eerie, and on our website at www.unpackingtheerie.com.
01:37:29
Speaker
Yes, and special thanks to all of you who subscribe to our Patreon.
01:37:34
Speaker
As we've mentioned before, we do all the research for this, we edit, and we don't have any sponsorships or ads.
01:37:43
Speaker
So Patreon support is super helpful in just keeping this project sustainable, keeping the Buzzsprout subscription going, paying for the website, all the stuff.
01:37:53
Speaker
So thank you so much.
01:37:55
Speaker
Sari, Liz, Clifton.
01:37:57
Speaker
Jill, Victoria, and Lindsay.
01:37:59
Speaker
Lauren, Vivian, Valerie.
01:38:02
Speaker
Micheline, Montana, Katrina.
01:38:04
Speaker
Raina, Allie, Jake.
01:38:06
Speaker
Drithi, Daphne, and Katie.
01:38:08
Speaker
Vern, Meredith, H, and Vince.
01:38:11
Speaker
To April, Aaron, and Ellen.
01:38:14
Speaker
And to Brittany, Alyssa, and Meredith R. Yay, thank you so much.
01:38:19
Speaker
Thank you.