Lazily channel hopping the other night when, as timing would have it, a woman in her late 60’s looked at me from the TV screen and said: “They burned a piece of my brain out!” and jabbed at her forehead with a finger. Of course I immediately dropped the remote control and kicked it to a safe distance. Who wouldn’t?
Mental: A history of the madhouse (BBC4) was a spook-house story of a documentary. I am not sure that was the original intention, but that is how it played out. To me it was clearly up with the gothic horror films of Corman.
Creepy location? Check.
Beginning with the prison-style asylums of the early 20th Century, it was suggested this was the time when doctors and psychologists in Britain were tentatively starting to come to terms with certain “disturbances of the mind” which may be curable. Grainy footage set the scene: inmates, many of them old, frequently appeared underfed and always in a repeating world of their own.
Evidence of past terrible happenings in the creepy location? Check.
The inmates often were abused by nurses. And surely this was a job that attracted a fair share of sadists. The doctors had more legitimate lines for their subjected cruelty: that of the Hippocratic Oath.
Induced diabetic comas, lobotomies and, perhaps the best known macabre procedure of all, Electro-shock treatment were all deployed in early days of the attempted curing of mental illness. The idea was these practices would somehow “reset” the brain. Again, grainy footage was shown of the alarming practices taking place.
Far greater than a well edited three camera angled horror film, there is something in the way that medical procedures were filmed back then – a steady lens, unyielding and unflinching for an objective, academic purpose, not meant for public witness – which excels in the inherently disturbing.
Modern reconstructions of the procedures filled in gaps where stark, genuine footage un-illuminated.
In this way, Electro-shock equipment was filmed in close up. It was of typical Great British working design of early 20th Century: practical and without wit. It could have been designed for a trench. Nothing but a tin plated control box, pleated brown cables leading to a head band with a couple of pads at either side bathed in a tub of conductive liquid. The panning camera slowly fed in other details: A dial with
VOLTS written above: A basic metal switch with
OFF below and
ON above, which could have been easily seen as innocent as the means of starting a family Train Set in motion: Then, in what is one of life’s misnomers, a small green trigger push button marked
TREAT.
Also used to move the documentary along was a pair of legs clearly inferred to be belonging to a psychiatric nurse of 1950 ominously filmed at shin height, pacing empty hospital washed corridors, sometimes pushing a metal trolley – syringes and crude medical apparatus (or cream cakes for all we knew), out of sight above. Every-so-often the documentary would cut to those legs walking toward the camera or across the screen but never away.
Aged talking heads of doctors and nurses discussed of some early successes. I couldn’t help but think it was not simply the few inmates still with their senses quickly coming to them to say in crisp pathe newsreel English: “You know doctor, I am feeling very much chipper – much more like a normal street chap. In fact, I would suggest, I don’t need the electro-shock treatment again. Wot ho?”
Dream sequence that only serves to add 8 minutes to the film, possible partial nudity hinted at to keep the viewer watching? Check
The documentary touched on the 1960’s and the development of a drug culture where in one direction it apparently expanded the mind and caused a side of a generation to appear nuts and paint cartoon flowers on themselves and each other and wear nothing under lambskin body warmers, and another direction where those who really were certifiably nuts had their minds dampened down and effectively closed off to creativity.
A madman of pseudo-science, a young maiden and a device of torture? Check.
Thankfully, the 1970’s harked back to a more innocent time with a return to absolutely Tudor looking medical apparatus to be strapped and clamped to the heads of patients by doctors. The patient specifically was the woman who introduced the programme to me with her extraordinary statement. Her back story was she was prone to getting a bit angry in the early 70’s and had sought help for it from her GP who sent her to see a specialist.
A BBC documentary was allowed to film this new, cutting age treatment taking place.
The doctor in the 1970’s gave a matter of fact description of the crazy Dr. Frankenstein experim… I mean perfectly routine medical procedure to be undertaken: Clamp the heavy, iron apparatus tightly to the patient’s shaved head. Replace some of the cranium bone with nylon weave. Insert long electrodes through the weave. Identify the portion of the brain for Anger. Send an electrical current down the electrodes to burn off that part of the brain. Massage lotion onto the scalp.
Well, doctor when you put it like that – it sounds like hokum dressed up in a white coat. Why not bring back boring holes into the skull to release tension headache daemons too? Come on – this is all very well for a Tomorrow’s World demonstration on a foam headed dummy about the wonders to be expected of 1987, but you are proposing on actually using this for real?
In the old documentary footage, the woman lay, conscious, on the slab table as one doctor began skewering her clamped brain. She moved when the first one went in. “Why did you do that? Why?” the monotone voiced doctor asked, “I am only slipping in the electrodes, there is no current. There is no need for that reaction.” he patronised to a woman he had stabbed right in the brain.
The woman apologised, tongs protruding out the top of her bald head, “I couldn’t help it. I just had to shake. It feels like my brain is shaking. I am frightened.”
The doctor, I would think well aware of the cameras rolling, did not empathise with a “As well you should be frightened – let’s face it, I am essentially twiddling around a couple of sticks in your head as if it was a bowl of linguini. And to be honest I only came up with all this the other day, in my shed, to get on the telly. This thing strapped to your head is a fuel sump. I am quite frightened too” but instead tried to reassure her with more claptrap:
“Of course you are scared. I expected that. It is because I have located the part of the brain which makes fear. Everything is OK.”
Oh everything is OK, that is reassuring – you have just touched the bit of my brain that tells me I am frightened. Is that really how a brain works? It seems a little rudimentary. I would have thought the synaptic connections were more intricate than what a couple of electrodes 3mm in diameter could identify with anything like the degree of accuracy required, in any case you do not seem to have the monitoring equipment essential for…
“Right, starting the burning now!”
The footage ends with the noise of electrical shorting and fizzing.
Talking in 2010, the woman is now a successful local charity campaigner. She still feels that the operation should never have been allowed (she had consented under the influence of medication and the threat that she would remain in mental care forever without it) and still believes she suffers side-effects.
Finally in her piece, she said: “But there is no point in me getting angry about it”
No point or physically can’t?
Apparent decreasing threat of horror occurring? Check
The documentary explained that during the 1980’s asylums were shutting down. The inmates were left to an overwhelmed and underprepared Care in the Community Service in its infancy and so lots were, in reality, left to fend for themselves. [
Or, with a more horror spin on proceedings, let loose] Many ex-patients found solace in charities and religious groups. Many improved without the electric prongs being pushed into their brains and medications that caused comas.
Ending which cranks up the horror and inflames the terror may still genuinely exist for the viewer? Check
The documentary ended in relatively modern times. It told of improving care in the community standards and a greater understanding of mental health issues. Things are better and further away from the sinister asylums than ever. Then just when it seemed that this is the happy ending it was always leading towards the documentary lays its final hand.
A lady, who spent all her formative years in an asylum because she was both agoraphobic and claustrophobic [
the mentally ill Goldilocks?], now lives independently with minimal care and medication. She describes the issues she faces: “I have to get my own food and have to learn how to cope. I have to take my medication that keeps me calm. The neighbours still take in their children when they see me coming. One neighbour shouted last week ‘Go back to Broadmoor!’ I shouted back, ‘Well, if I kill you then I would go back to Broodmoor!’ ha, ha!”
That was at best an unconsidered response, given her circumstance, but it raised a valuable point that the documentary was keen to highlight. Right at the end.
With these modern, often more holistic approaches to those with mental health issues there has been an increasing number of violent incidents involving some who might otherwise have been held in asylums. A police psychologist is seen briefing a police unit that there is a man who is threatening an indiscriminate killing or three because he is no longer seeing his therapist. Then there is the gentleman who stabbed a commuter in the eye with a pen, murdering him, for no rational reason.
So the final message was pitch perfect for a tale of terror. It was terrifying because it was not made implicitly in the documentary, rather it was given time to fester alone in the viewers own mind, just into the witching hour: These people in the past would have been locked in a secure ward somewhere far away from me. But not now.
