Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.
Asylums are nothing more than gardens of human cabbages, of miserable, grotesque, repugnant human beings watered with the fertilizer of injections.
I'd watched too many schoolmates graduate into mental institutions, into group homes and jails, and I knew that locking people up was paranormal - against normal, not beside it. Locks didn't cure; they strangled.
The idea that all the people locked up in mental hospitals are sane while all the people walking about are mad is merely a literary cliche, put about by people who should be locked up. I assure you there is not much in it. Taken as a whole, the sane are out there the sick are in here. For example you are in here because you have delusions that sane people are put in mental hospitals.
In the 1830s, Dorothea Dix revolutionized the care of people with mental illness by taking them out of jails and caring for them in asylums, later known as state hospitals.
The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people, but if we tried to shut up the insane we should run out of building materials.
When I said that the mentally ill should be in institutions, public universities weren't the kind of institutions I had in mind.
Like fast-food chains, child psychiatric inpatient units and the wholesale psychiatric drugging of children, in and out of hospitals, are recent...and remarkably popular products and practices.
As we go on with our lives we tend to forget that the jails and the hospitals and the madhouses and the graveyards are packed.
And I realize the unbearable anguish of insanity: how uninformed people can be thinking insane people are "happy," O God, in fact it was Irwin Garden once warned me not to think the madhouses are full of "happy nuts." (p. 200)
Madhouses are houses made on purpose to cause suffering . . . I cannot stand any longer the screams of these creatures.
He's right: They have to put madmen with madmen.
I wasn't inspired by lunatic asylums or anything like that.
The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.
I am a woman with chronic schizophrenia. I have spent hundreds of days in psychiatric hospitals. I could have ended up living most of my life on a back ward, but things turned out quite differently.
Ex-cons always say, "You never know what makes the wheels go round until you've done time in the joint." This is even more true of psychiatric hospitals. It is a perfect mass hypostatization of society, the organization of the Social Lie.
