Envision yourself living in a mental asylum, being covered in filth, forced to work, and tortured by guards fill your schedule. You constantly despise every minute of every day, but you can’t leave. This is what a mental asylum was like before Nellie Bly stood up for the mentally ill. An upstander is someone who stands up for what they believe in. According to PBS, a world renown educational television channel, Nellie Bly was born Elizabeth Jane Cochran and took on the alias Nellie Bly when she began her journalistic career (Nellie Bly). Her father died when she was just six years old throwing her family into a large amount of debt (Nellie Bly). Thinking it would help her family, she attended the Indiana Normal School when she was 15 (Nellie
According to PBS, Bly impersonated “a mad person, and came back from Blackwell’s Island ten days later with stories of cruel beatings, ice cold baths, and meals that included rancid butter.” This means that Bly went undercover, jeopardizing her life to help others. The Biography.com editors explain, “One of Bly’s earliest assignments at the paper was to author a piece detailing the experiences endured by patients… she pretended to be a mental patient in order to be committed to the facility, where she lived from ten days.” The describe her life while in the mental asylum. From the grueling conditions to the horrendous food, she risked it all for the greater good. In her book, Ten Days in a Mad-House, Bly explains the various ways in which she was harmed (Bartle and Ockerldoom). These include: spoiled food and rough living conditions. “She endured filthy conditions, rotten food and physical abuse from doctors and nurses,”(Fritz). Although, through all this, Bly persevered until she was able to help the mentally ill. This is just one way in which Nellie Bly showed she was an
According to the Biography.com editors, Bly wrote multiple articles about the horrific conditions. She then published them in the World, and they were later compiled into a book. This book, Ten Days in a Mad-House, explains the various treatments she was put through (Bartle and Ockerldoom) It also includes the treatments her fellow companions went through. She highly disagreed with these conditions and ruthlessly attacked these policies. These articles also shed light on improvements in health care (Biography.com editors). The editors of Encyclopædia Britannica, a world renown encyclopedia site, explains that through these articles Bly became “the best-known woman journalist of her day.” They explain that her asylum expose rose her to fame amongst the journalist
In Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the film Girl, Interrupted directed by James Mangold authors both look at American psychiatric institutions of the 1960s and explore the idea that the hospitals act as microcosms for society. A microcosm is a small universe representative of a larger one thus suffers the same problems of conformity and rebellion, prejudice against minorities and authority figures ruling absolutely. Both authors use stylistic techniques to position the audience to respond to ideas common in both texts.
The documentary only showed the efforts of the staff and how the majority of the patients returned to the facility. However, some patients actually were cured. Some of the patients were drugged up and locked into solitary within the Bellevue facility, which only made them worse. Nellie Bly went undercover Blackwell Island, which she called the “human rat trap.” The location was mostly a warehouse, they did not provide much care.
The excerpt from the novel And The Birds Rained Down explains how Gertrude was sent into a psychiatric hospital at the age of sixteen by her father due to the reasoning of “insanity”. Throughout the story, it explains how her brothers son, Bruno, is trying to get her out of the hell that is considered the psychiatric hospital. Her actions and the way she approached things were too, normal, so to speak. Even though she was treated like trash by her own family, she still has life in her, and she continues to live. It seems as if even though she is in a place that is considered by many people a place to be feared, for the mentally ill, sick, crazy people, she still has a lively young spirit. She enjoyed living, she wanted to live, that was her
	Lizzie suffered from psychomotor epilepsy, a strange seizure of the temporal lobe that has one distinct symptom: a "black-out" in which the patients carry out their actions in a dream state, aware of every action without knowing what they are doing. Lizzie Borden seemed to have two entirely different personalities: the good daughter (a member of the Congressional Church, and a brilliant (conversationalist), and the bad daughter (deeply resentful of the patriarchy). These two personalities could be explained by the families' contradiction about their social statuses. She also had a habit of stealing from the local merchants.
She has enjoyed greater commercial success, longevity and popularity despite her reputation for writing unacceptable and bad literature. Blyton also fulfils the dictionary definition of prestigious as she has had influence, a reputation (which has shifted from good to bad) derived from passed achievements. She produced an enormous amount of writing in her career; at its height, in 1955, she produced no less than 70 works in a single year. She was a respected educationalist writing educational primers and with a weekly column in Teachers World (1923-27). It is hardly surprising that vast numbers of people have read her novels.
She was then dropped off at a one-room flat on North Brother Island (the flat was on the grounds of Riverside Hospital). This was to become her permanent home, but after 3 years of solitary confinement in 1910, she was released on the premise that she would never cook or prepare any sort of food or drink for anyone else ever again, and that she would have to check in with health officials every few months (almost like some she was a prisoner on parole, in her eyes, she was exactly that; a prisoner). Eventually health officials lost track of Mary. Mary Mallon changed her name to Mary Brown (often referred to Mrs. Brown, even though she never married) and continued to work as a cook at Sloane Maternity Hospital before 25 new cases of Typhoid broke out. In 1915 Health officials took Mary back to North Brother Island,
All You Need Is Hate If life in the 1960s was a collective journey to the Underworld, then it is terrifying to notice how many of us have failed to come back. (Marshall Berman, The Sixties)
In One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Nurse Ratched is the antagonist and her use of cruel treatments is the main argument for malpractice. She uses daily doses of medication, electroshock therapy, and a lobotomy procedure to “treat” the patients in the ward. “Put your troubled mind at ease, my friend. In all
In her well-known short story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor skillfully describes the difficulty of finding a morally upright human being, whether it is a man or a woman. No one is perfect, everyone has inadequacies and shortcomings, and she presents this cleverly in her story. She is able to support this view of mankind through her characters. They are self-centered, egotistical human beings who can be judged by their words and actions. This is especially true of the protagonist (the grandmother) and the antagonist (the Misfit). The grandmother tries to portray herself as a virtuous woman, but in the end O’Connor shows that her actions are always self-serving and that morally, she is not that different from the Misfit.
Dorothea noticed that the mentally ill were placed in prisons because people didn’t know what else to do with them. Her early family life, which consisted of an abusive alcoholic dad and a mother that was not in good mental health, was very troubling and led to Dorothea’s guardianship of her brothers. Dorothea became a teacher and then centered her life on prison reform and the creation of asylums and homes for the mentally
Almost everyone has heard the legacy about this young, teenage World War II icon. Her story, her family, her personal life, and almost everything in her life; the reason for this was her diary. Her diary was published by her father, Otto Frank. Although some parts edited out, this diary had become well known as a hopeful yet horrifying time for the Jews. The way Anne Frank wrote about her life made all the horrors of the Holocaust real. She was about 13-years-old when she went into hiding with 7 other people in the place they hid called the Secret Annex. Later, they were found and had an inescapable fate with the concentration camp. The concentration camps were full of revolting conditions; over-packed bunks, starvation, disease, overworking of prisoners, torture, and the scent of death always in the air. There were approximately 6 million Jews killed in this terrifying massacre from all around the world. In these next few statements, I’ll tell you more about the Holocaust, Concentration camps, Anne Frank’s Story, and her legacy she left behind.
A lot of thoughts and observations come to mind while watching The New Asylums. This is a documentary about life in prison for people who have mental diseases, so some of the thoughts and observations are actually quite sad. Many of the prisoners shown in the documentary look sad and defeated, and they have a right to, because having a mental disease even in the real world is very hard. In prison, they are allowed to refuse their medication, although at least there are people who will try to help them. Still, it looks miserable, even more miserable than prison looks for people who aren't suffering from a disease like schizophrenia. Mental illness is often used as the punch line of a joke, but like most other punch lines, it isn't that funny because it offends and demeans a whole subgroup of people. Subgroups are actually what stick out the most and make up the previously mentioned thoughts and observations. While watching all of this sadness on the screen, it's hard not to notice that there are some trends. The documentary was filmed in an all-male prison, so trends in gender aren't shown by the movie, but even the casual observer will notice that most of the inmates who are interviewed or showcased are people of color. This could indicate one of two things: there is a higher number of people of color who are affected by mental disorders or there is a higher number of people of color who are persecuted and tried by the law, ending up in prisons such as the one in the movie. Studying criminology is important because those questions matter, not just to the ruling group of the legal system, but to the individuals affected by disease and persecution, to their families, and to their communities. Investigating an obvious trend helps ans...
Rose Mary Walls is mentally ill. I am not a doctor; therefore, I cannot medically diagnose her but I strongly feel she has a bipolar disorder and depression. Her overly emotional tendencies, narcissism, and also lack of maturity are all signs that point to Rose Mary having a mental disorder.
Chained beaten with rods, lashed into obedience.” She had also witness sexual abuse, starvation, and prisoners left naked and cold. After witnessing all this cruelty towards the criminals she went around Europe and America establishing her own mental hospitals and had actually agreed to teaching Sunday school in jails. Eventually she successfully stated her case to queen Victoria and the pope.
Anne had poor health, suffered a difficult journey. In 1666 the family experienced a strong fire, which, among other things, almost entirely burned down the library where Anne received a good education (in the library had 800 volumes on the history, theology, medicine, political science); there is even a poem by Bradstreet dedicated to this fire which made so much harm to her family. Following these events, she developed tuberculosis, she lost her daughter. It was supported by faith, will, and help of loved ones.