Murder in a lunatic asylum

[1carazy675]

Im writing a personal and imaginative story and just wondering why someone would get put in one.

[JockSporran]

Lunatic asylums were the 19th century forerunners of psychiatric hospitals, though they were more for keeping inmates or patients under control rather than caring for them or treating them, especially as mental illness was not understood and psychiatry was in its infancy.

People were committed to them as they had become psychiatrically ill and doctors did not know how to treat it.

We now know there are two types of psychiatric illness - neuroses, where behaviour is disturbed but the sufferer has not lost their reason, and psychoses (insanity), where the sufferer can no longer tell what is real and what is fantasy. The latter cases would have been committed to an asylum in the 19th century. Without modern psychoanalysis and medication, they would most likely have deteriorated. Unlike today, they would have stayed there.

[Bewlay Bros]

The greatest song ever written about lunatic asylums. For your aural pleasure and inspiration.


http://youtube.com/watch?v=8pBTjxu3RSA

Day after day
They send my friends away
To mansions cold and grey
To the far side of town
Where the thin men stalk the streets
While the sane stay underground

Day after day
They tell me I can go
They tell me I can blow
To the far side of town
Where it's pointless to be high
'Cause it's such a long way down
So I tell them that
I can fly, I will scream, I will break my arm

I will do me harm
Here I stand, foot in hand, talking to my wall
I'm not quite right at all...am I?

Don't set me free, I'm as heavy as can be
Just my librium and me
And my E.S.T. makes three

'Cause I'd rather stay here
With all the madmen
Than perish with the sadmen roaming free

And I'd rather play here
With all the madmen
For I'm quite content they're all as sane as me

(Where can the horizon lie
When a nation hides
Its organic minds in a cellar...dark and grim
They must be very dim)

Day after day
They take some brain away
Then turn my face around
To the far side of town
And tell me that it's real
Then ask me how I feel

Here I stand, foot in hand, talking to my wall
I'm not quite right at all
Don't set me free, I'm as helpless as can be
My libido's split on me
Gimme some good 'ole lobotomy

'Cause I'd rather stay here
With all the madmen
Than perish with the sadmen
Roaming free And I'd rather play here
With all the madmen
For I'm quite content
They're all a

[Skreecheeboy]

Observe http://youtube.com/watch?v=cGDzY2jDqSM&feature =related

[Senga 2]

As recently as the 50's women could be placed in psychiatric hospitals for trying to escape from violent and abusive husbands. One women who was nursed by my mother in law died about 6 or 7 years after spending most of her adult life there for this reason. She was found on a rooftop and was too scared to say why so was whipped off to the local hospital.

[spudqueen]

During Victorian times any woman who had puepreral psychosis http://www.iop.kcl.ac.uk/iop/prt/pnd.htm would have ended up in a lunatic asylum, and would probably have stayed there for life even though she would have been cured, even naturally by the passage of time.

[EngTeach]

Being a Kennedy!!

[hy-mabel]

As recently as the sixties, women who became pregnant without being married, were classed as "morally defective" and placed in an asylum.
Sometimes, they remained in for years and years.

Read The Vanishing World of Esme Lennox, which deals with this, very tragic scenario.