Violence in American Horror Story’s “Asylum”

The history of mental illness in America is a strange and turbulent one. People with mental health issues tend to be much maligned in society, labeled as “crazy”, “insane”, even “dangerous”. It’s important to consider this while watching the newest season of American Horror Story, which focuses on asylums run by a nun with hang-ups about sin and a doctor who conducts suspicious experiments on patients.

Essentially, the pilot featured nearly every negative aspect of mental health history. In a way, one could say this is fine, because people should be aware of the negative aspects of asylums and sanatoriums. People should be aware that mental health patients have been abused and experimented on. You should be aware that people have been locked up against their consent, for the simple reason that they didn’t fit in with societal standards and mental illness was the best method for explaining away their alleged defection. They could be locked up, never to be heard from again. It really was not that long ago that “homosexuality” was removed from the DSM-III (in 1973) as a form of mental illness. However, while most people know that, what they do not know is that some psychiatrists circulated a petition arguing against the removal of the word, and in 1980, a new category was created called “ego-dystonic homosexuality”, which still claimed this sexual identity as a disorder. Complete removal of homosexuality was official in 1986. See? Not that long ago.

People are also not aware of the extensive history of lobotomies, which was also a somewhat recent practice as it was discovered in 1935. Rosemary Kennedy, JFK’s younger sister, is a famous victim of a prefrontal lobotomy which her father consented to as a method to try and contain her violent mood swings and outbursts. She was only 23. As a result, she was rendered incapable of doing hardly anything at all, even though despite her mood swings and low IQ, she lived a fairly normal life. Other controversial methods of therapies were discovered around the same time, including various forms of shock therapies and electroconvulsive therapy. ECT is actually still used today; Carrie Fisher, of Star Wars fame, talks about her experiences with it frequently and it’s pretty jarring to read about. While she does claim it helps, she also admits that it erases huge blocks of memory: “What I’ve found is that, at least for the moment, most of my old memories remain intact, but I totally lose the months before and after the treatment. Exactly how much time I lose is really difficult to say, because what I’m ultimately doing is trying to remember how much I forgot, which is an incredibly complex endeavor, to say the least” (Shockaholic, p. 5). It helps, but not without a consequence.

The National Mental Health Association (NMHA) has adopted for its symbol a bell. There is an actual metal bell weighing 300 lbs that the NMHA had made, with the inscription: “Cast from shackles which bound them, this bell shall ring out hope for the mentally ill and victory over mental illness”. The bell was made from the discarded iron shackles and chains used in asylums to restrain patients by their wrists and ankles as a form of treatment.

This is a history full of pain, suffering, and stigma. There is still stigma today, and this is part of the reason why I strongly dislike the new series of American Horror Story so far. To appropriate this traumatic history and use it as a measure of “freakiness”, to scare and shock viewers, as it explores this strange asylum with a serial killer who skins women, a doctor who performs Mengele-like experiments on patients who have no family or friends, nuns who dream about doing the deed and take their sexual frustration out in a weird form of repressed anger, and apparently, aliens, is exploitative and negates much of the positive aspects that the psychological field has accomplished. Ryan Murphy manages to drive his stereotyping home by featuring a Schlitzie lookalike right down to the gingham dress and hair ribbon, who sweetly gives Sarah Paulson some flowers and in the same scene is mentioned to have brutally killed family. Schlitzie, best known for his role in the 1931 film Freaks, had a sweet, caring disposition and was sadly abandoned to a hospital for a time and became depressed as a result (he was eventually rescued and had a happy ending). This bothered me because it was yet another aspect of appropriation and mangling it into something negative.

While I am interested to see where this season continues, I don’t think it is off to a good start. Horror does not equal shock value, and that is precisely what American Horror Story: Asylum is attempting to do. Where the first season left off on misogynistic representations of women and glorifying bad boy murderers, the second season picks up on the exploitation and stereotyping of mental illness. In a world where mental illness is already still heavily stigmatized, this is an ignorant and unnecessary bastardization of mental health practices.

–Cait

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