1. Friday, April 20 Creative Writing Exercise and
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Introduction Part 2: Mental Hospitals

2. CREATIVE WRITING EXERCISE
Writing Prompt: Write your own poem in the style of the Beats. Your subject matter will be something you don’t like about school and/or being a teenager in 2018.
Guidelines:
Your poem must be written in first-person and use some form of repetition.
Your poem must also include in some way the object your group has been given.
Your poem should also be written with oral performance in mind (whether or not you actually choose to perform it).

3. Closing: PARODIES OF “BEATNIK POETRY”
Beat Poetry has been ripe for satire and parody almost from the moment it became popular in the late 1950s. Many of the cliches people associate with poetry (and especially poetry readings) can, for better or for worse, be traced back to the Beats.
Here, Mike Myers does his own version of a Beat poem in the movie So I Married an Axe Murderer.

5. Mental Hospitals in the 1930s-1960s

6. By today’s standards, conditions in mental hospitals were unimaginable
overcrowded
dirty
understaffed

7. Inside the Institution
Patients provided with “adequate care” and often segregated.
Patients usually given uniforms and daily “chores.” (It wasn’t unit 1973 that New York state banned public hospitals from requiring patients to work in exchange for room and board.)
Families often ashamed of patients (sometimes denying their existence).
Ultimately, some hospitals became holding areas for a person’s entire life.

8. Medical Care in Mental Hospitals
Deaths and injuries sometimes resulted in both appropriate and inappropriate treatments.
Patients treated with medically approved and non-medically approved procedures:
Put in tanks of ice-cold water
Spun in chairs for hours
Forced to take “medications” (powerful psychoactive drugs)
Placed in seclusion or in restraints

9. Types of Treatments for the Mentally Ill
Group therapy
Drug therapy
Electroshock therapy
Lobotomy

10. Drug Therapy
Thorazine: first psychotropic drug made it possible to calm unruly behavior, anxiety, agitation, and confusion without using physical restraints
Chlorpromazine: used to treat schizophrenic or manic depressive disorder

11. Electroshock/Electroconvulsive Therapy
Medical treatment for severe mental illness in which a small amount of electricity is introduced to the brain.
Became very popular in the 1930s and 40s
Originated to control negative behaviors in animals but doctor noticed that patients were more “normal” after having seizure
Was cruelly used as control device in most wards
Still used today to treat some forms of severe depression

12. Lobotomy
Surgical procedure severing nerve pathways in frontal lobes of the brain
Often used as a last resort for patients whose behavioral patterns were not improved by other forms of treatment
Between , over 100,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States
Aim was that “the patient might be transformed from a disturbed to a quiet clement [insane person].” There was no intention to “help” the patient; goal was only to eradicate the behavior which others found undesirable.

13. LET THERE BE LIGHT (1946)
Many of the patients Kesey encountered working at the Menlo Park hospital were likely WWII veterans. Vets returning from overseas often suffered from what we would now call undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder and other related psychological conditions, as vividly and heartbreakingly depicted in this clip from the 1946 U.S. Army film Let There Be Light, directed by the famous Hollywood director John Huston..
This film was considered so shocking that it was suppressed by the Army and not shown to the general public until the 1980s. In 2010 it was selected for preservation at the United States National Film Registry at the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

14. Clip from Let There Be Light

15. “Deinstitutionalization revolution” of the mid 1960s
Radical deinstitutionalization revolution begins
Supposed to end cruel and inadequate care of institutions
Individuals would live in their communities and have a “normalized” life
Group homes, residential care facilities, and rooming houses were developed
Movement helped break up control that was happening in hospitals
Number of institutionalized mentally ill people in the U.S. drops from 560,000 to 130,000 by 1980