I can honestly not think of anything more terrifying than being admitted to a lunatic asylum, except maybe one in the 1800s. Rewind time by 200 years or so and the day-to-day happenings in loony bins was the stuff of nightmares.
A bad combination of a lack of knowledge and empathy when it came to treating people with mental disorders coupled with barbaric medical practises lead to some of the pictures you are about to see.
You can find more at So Bad So Good if morbid curiosity gets the better of you. Otherwise check out the ones I’ve posted below to remind you that there are worse things than being back at work today.
That last image in particular left me feeling very spooked. I did some searching online and found Rhoda’s story here: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-mysterious-rhoda-derry
Some filmmakers tried to raise money to make a documentary about her a few years back but it doesn’t look like they were successful.
She looks the way she does in that picture because she was deemed a hazard to herself and others due to the violent outbursts she used to have and was subsequently locked in a wooden box covered in canvas for forty years.
Her story ends well though as she was rescued and rehabilitated in 1904 by a Dr. George Zeller. He admitted her to the asylum he ran, the Peoria Hospital for the Incurably Insane, where she began to show “improvement to her mental health and made great progress in her condition.â€
At the height of her delirium though, she kept claiming that she could see the devil. She called him “Old Scratch†and eventually blinded herself to make the visions of him stop.
Heavy.
Um, I have no idea how this got so intense. Let’s just all go back to work then shall we?
-ST
