So, I’m currently deciding on a setting for my horror/fantasy story, and I think a mental asylum would work well. The thing is, I can’t find anything on google, safari, writing websites, reddit, and basically any writing forum on mental asylums. What I have in my mind is that they’re like prison-hospitals? I’m not sure if this is right, but do they go in to like an appointment every day to work on their mental health or something? What do they do the rest of the day? If you could help that would be absolutely amazing!
This all depends a lot on the timeframe. Mental hospitals aren't really the horror places that they might have used to be. At least not in my experience. They may also differ depending on what kind of patients they are equipped to handle. My experience(only a few years ago) was this: I had a room for myself, quiet a large one with a very large window and a bathroom with shower + toilet. I was in a wing of something like nine such rooms. We could close the door behind us, and only the caretakers could open it. We had television in our room and a large television in the wing. The wing had like a square outside area in the middle where people could get some fresh air(usually smoke cigarettes). We could go out into a closed courtyard to get some exercise, the facility also had a gym that you could book with a personal trainer. The facility was very modern and in good quality. Was there for about a month, but I could also come and go a little as I pleased, I was never locked in fully. I went to university at the time, and I could go to some of my classes. Everyone in the staff was very professional and friendly, despite me telling them some things about myself that were morally wrong. There were a lot of strange events that occurred during my stay, but I think most of them were due to me hallucinating. For example, two employees stood near me and talked about things I had done that they couldn't possibly know of. My fellow patients were never hostile towards me, but one patient had smashed a window during one night. Another patient told me he had destroyed his summer home. There were a lot of strange characters there, and I guess I was one of them. Had to call the caretakers one time as a fellow patient had fallen unconscious. What else... The facility was regularly cleaned and kept in a very nice condition. Security was tight, had to pass a metal detector and something like 5 keypad doors to get to my wing. 2 keypad doors to get to the courtyard. So, I would rate the whole thing 4/5. Minus one point due to strangeness... which was probably my brain's fault anyway... You can ask me pretty much anything you want about my experience there if you want. I can share in PM if something is too sensitive for the board. EDIT: During the day, I was mostly reading or watching television. I had some appointments with a psychiatrist and a psychologist. The only horror element probably comes from the patient's own mind. Oh.. and my username... hilariously prophetic... really, what the hell, universe?
If I google 'experiences in a mental asylum', I come up with quite a few potentially promising hits? One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest is the classic fiction and an excellent read, though outdated in practical terms. As @Madman says, asylums as they were (basically just a holding place for anyone who didn't fit into 'normal life', covering everything from Down's Syndrome to anxiety disorders) don't really exist any more. We know (and care) A LOT more about mental health and neurodivergent conditions than we once did, and consequently we treat each differently according to its needs, which means no more locking everybody up in a big house together and throwing away the key. Even for the most severe situations, where people would be unable to live independently in any way and struggle to communicate their most basic needs with the world, there is a general understanding in psychiatry that there is still a person in there. I'm not saying that this always leads to exemplary care, and there are still many tragic and horrifying stories about people with these conditions being subjected to appalling cruelty, but it's now recognised as cruelty rather than 'oh well they're lunatics, they don't matter anyway'. As a concrete example, directly behind my house there is a care home for people with extremely severe mental disabilities, people who will never be able to live alone or care for themselves in any meaningful capacity. I read the annual inspection report out of curiosity and was quite amazed at what is expected for a place like this. Every patient has their own room, and in it is a 'personality board', basically a notice board which displays their interests and things they like, even if it's just 'the colour yellow'. They also have a file which tells of their dislikes and medical and personal history in their room, and staff are expected to familiarise themselves with all of this. A sample of patients able to communicate in a rudimentary way were interviewed by the inspectors and asked questioned (in appropriate language) like 'do you feel the staff listen to your wants and needs', 'if you have a problem with your primary caregivers do you know how to make a complaint without going through them', and 'do you expect that you would be listened to if you did make such a complaint'. These are standard questions asked by the inspectors for all these types of institutions, and while I'm certain that in many cases they still fall short, the fact that they even exist shows you how far we've come from the 'mindless drooling lunatic' stereotype of yesteryear.
If you want a few good contemporary personal narratives from inside mental health treatment centers (they aren't called asylums anymore) i would read Suzanne Scanlon's Promising Young Women (fiction) and Susannna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted. Both are almost completely set inside mental health facilities and are built on an interesting cyclical plot structure that is meant to echo their fractured mental states. Very fast reads. You coild complete each in three hour stints. Valuable for what it actually feels like to live there. You could do horror there, but more on the psychological horror ghan anything else. It is a lot less of the zombies locked in a room sort of style than it used to be.
There's the classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as another example of fiction, and it tends to be a bit on the darker side. My experience inside a mental health facility was not quite what others have described. The ones in my area are more for addicts and sometimes there are people with mental health issues. They're very understaffed, and the times I was there we didn't really have much structure. We were kind of left to our own distractions. The last one I visited had a particularly violent man (I'm not gonna go too far into what he did/said), and he picked fights with people. He had to be sedated most of the time. The staff we did have were usually friendly and did their best to keep the peace. I shared a room, and it had bathrooms that only locked from the outside, so you couldn't have a secure experience inside. One of the places had food delivered to us, and the other had a small cafeteria. Both had a big common area, and sometimes we were allowed outside. If you want a more historical look at asylums, I recommend looking up Penhurst or Waverly. Those places were for long term mental health patients in the past (as well as a few other functions over the course of history). But there are rumors that those places are haunted, too, so that might help you?
Yeah, as others have mentioned, asylum is an archaic thing of the past. You could turn it into a period piece, research realistic modern mental hospitals, or go unrealistic. I'm writing a paranormal asylum at the moment so I've gone unrealistic. Think Arkham Asylum, therefore it is a prison. A place where criminally insane "people" (in my story they have supernatural abilities) who are too dangerous to be anywhere else are thrown and kept forever.
You can use Riverview Hospital as an example. It's where a lot of the "ghosts in the asylum" movies are filmed. Look it up in Google Images. It's creepy. I think there's webpages on it. Probably entire books too? Brief link. I'm sure there's better.
In Okinawa there's an abandoned childrens mental asylum stuck on an abandoned base. I'vd spent the night in that place during a typhoon and it was quite the experience as well. Just look up a few scary places like the old abandoned asylums if you want to go more down the horror route. You won't find the same kinds of horror in modern treatment facilities. They used to be more like holding facilities or prisons than they are today.
From @Madman 's description it sounds like Nightmare on Elm Street 3 Dream Warriors actually got it pretty right. Watch that one, and add in the elements of the gym and all the keypad doors and you should have a pretty good idea for it.
It might be worth watching American Horror Story: Asylum, since that is an example of a horror/fantasy story set in a mental asylum.
There's a documentary called 'Cropsey' which might help. It is about an urban legend of this scary figure called Cropsey, but they think it developed when an old psychiatric facility was shut down due to lack of funding and a lot of the patients who didn't have family to look after them were basically just abandoned. It's been a long time since I watched it but I think that was the gist of it.
Previously, much was not known about the mentality of patients, as well as about mental disorders. Therefore, the most extreme cases were placed in psychiatric hospitals. Therefore, hospitals were more likely prisons for mentally ill people with a tendency to harm themselves or others. Experimental treatment were often performed on these patients, which often crippled patients rather than treated them. This was forgiven by the public for a long time, since the mentally ill could not really complain, they were more prisoners than patients. Even if they complained, no one listened or heard. Everything changed after the First World War. Many veterans returned from the war with varying degrees of severity of mental disorders. They needed help. They could not be treated or maimed like other patients. At the same time, the Veterans often have common sense, and when they see the inner kitchen of mental hospitals, they began to write complaints and take legal action. Which led to the reformation of mental hospitals. About the atrocities that have been done in mental hospitals, it is now harder to look for. But if you look for forbidden practices in psychology, I think you can find it. I've heard of those. Electroconvulsive therapy, Cold shower every hour, Isolation, Drugging, castration, Putting a person into a coma, Brain surgery. Maybe these links will help https://queenslandlawhandbook.org.au/the-queensland-law-handbook/health-and-wellbeing/mental-health-laws/prohibited-treatments/ https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00570878/document https://dualdiagnosis.org/mental-health-and-addiction/history/ So if you want to write about the horrors in the mental hospital. You need to write about the hospital before the First World War, which was closed because of these inhuman practices and scandals at the end of the First World War. Then you will have a time frame when looking for fragments for your story ...
I mean, there were also still practises like electroshock and water immersion in early post-war asylums, in the 50 and 60's. There were continuing stories of abuse such as Willowbrook State School NY, which was for children with mental disabilities, which was closed in 1987. The reform of mental health is as ongoing issue.
I would question why choose that setting, Unfortunately, while the Bedlam House style trope of a bad mental health institution, especially with old-style asylums, is supposed to be about the horrors of mistreatment and ineffective care for the mentally ill, the reality is this trope also stigmatises the mentally ill by treating them and their surroundings as eerie, threatening and often associated with the supernatural. In many cases, the patients of such stories, especially in video games, end up being some of the main threats. Which also ties into the larger issue of the way mental health can be conflated with immorality and danger, in terms of how bad behaviour is described ("psychotic" being misused) and the way mental illness is often depicted alongside villainous characteristics and the villain is the most mentally ill character. If you were to use a mental health horror setting, especially with a Bedlam House trope, I would be very deliberate in focusing most of the horror on the mistreatment, because in reality such institutions were more of a threat to their patients than their patients were to anyone else. That also means it would be beneficial to give more humanity and character to at least some of the patients. People with mental health issues aren't just hapless victims, and portraying them as so, while more sympathetic than making them threatening, can still feed into the idea of mental health as an uncomfortable and foreign thing that people want to isolate from society. And I would consider how specific mental illnesses are portrayed, it tends to be somewhat inaccurate and a story that deals with mental health majorly should strive to be more accurate specifically. Not that you should strive to name all the character's diagnoses, that can potentially make it worse if you name a disorder but then get the symptoms wrong, but you should consider what mental illness is actually like and avoid over-dramatising the spookiness.
What do you find scary about mental asylums? Is it the torment that has been enacted there? Is it the sickness and the frightening symptoms? Is it the possibility that the patients weren't sick and they knew something that we didn't? Pick an avenue. Whatever it is, you'll feel echoes of the past as you walk down the halls. The walls may be painted in a dull and unstimulating color, with paper decorations that are all smiles, but they can't hide the ominous net by the stairs, the padding on the corners, and the bars on the windows.
I walked up and down the empty white halls for days with nothing to do. I saw the psychiatrist for 2 minutes in the morning, where he prescribed me an anti-depressant. He wouldn't let me leave unless I agreed to start taking them. Most everyone preferred to waste their days in the common room where the TV was. There was nothing else to do. I tried to make my own mischief, using my college skills to draw nude women with a crayon; I wasn't allowed to have a pencil. The hygiene utilities were cheap. The shower was weak. By the second day, I was filthy, wearing the same clothes I had arrived in. The bathroom had no door; at last it had a small curtain. Every single person in the facility was there on 5150 hold. Most of us were there after suicide attempts. Some were parents. Some were teachers. One was totally not suicidal and was there on mistake. Many of them were on drugs: heroin. Every single person there was a grave situation and highly neurotic, the kind of person you didn't want as a roommate. I considered myself the most sane, the most intelligent, the most stable person out of all of them. I banged my head against the wall. A lot of the orderlies there were just young medical students getting their hours in for their degrees. They didn't know or care.
I think how an author depicts mental illnesses, institutions and patients depends on the focus of the story. Unless you personally know someone who was institutionalized or know a lot about psychiatric issues, mental illness actually is eerie and threatening, and the people suffering from it are quite rightly associated with the supernatural. It's only in very recent times that we've begun to develop different attitudes toward it, and the vast majority of people still react quite naturally with fear and revulsion to the mentally ill. In fact I'd say even many who have a more clinical attitude toward it still get that deep-down gut reaction when confronted face to face with the reality of a mental institution. Keep in mind I'm coming from a Jungian perspective. In contemporary Western society most of us say we aren't superstitious, but that's a very shallow attitude based largely on scientism and following popular social trends. And it's only the conscious mind that has this attitude. It's a veneer over the deep abyss of the collective unconscious, which doesn't think in rational terms but in dream imagery and deeply superstitious ways. One of the main reasons we fear the mentally ill is because at some level we're thinking "There but for the grace of God go I". I mean, maybe we don't bring God into it specifically, but we still have a fear that it could happen to us and we don't want to face that possibility. One of the big themes I keep bringing up on the board is that the collective unconscious is the reality that lives inside all of us, that our ancestors were always referring to when they created religions and mythologies and fairy tales etc. Scratch that—nobody creates these things, they were discovered. The people who make the discoveries are called prophets or shamans or witch doctors or whatever. Those are the ones able to obtain a glimpse into the collective unconscious, maybe many such glimpses, and come away unscathed but forever changed by it. The ones we call insane are stuck in there, deranged by it, incapable of emerging fully back to the comfortable shallow world of conscious thought. Clinical language and techniques were created in order to lay these fears and dreads to rest as much as possible. They're a form of armor against superstitious dread. In fact in many ways the more superstitious or religious language comes much closer to a true depiction, because it reflects our more natural reaction to that immensely powerful world within that we can normally ignore but that can well up and swallow us at times. And it's a world where logic and reason are forgotten dreams—wisps of mist torn and dispelled by raging winds. It's only when we're safely in our right mind—the conscious mind (ironically the left hemisphere)—that we can afford these luxuries.
My experience at a mental hospital was bland, I wouldn't write about it. The worst thing for me was the lack of a comfortable chair to sit on.
I'm not sure if electroconvulsive therapy is the same as electroshock therapy, but electroshock is still current (no pun intended). My adopted daughter has had multiple treatments with electroshock, and it has helped reduce her suicidal tendencies. In general, "mental asylums" went out of vogue in the 1970s and the mantra became "mainstreaming." Asylums were replaced by halfway houses. I know -- I was on the board of directors for a mental health halfway house for a decade. All but one of the "asylums" in my state closed down back then. The only one that's still operating is the one for the criminally insane, and that's equal part prison and mental health facility. It's where they send people who have committed serious crimes but who are deemed to be so out of it that they aren't able to participate in a trial.
This discussion whetted my curiosity, so I did a bit of web surfing to see what I could find about current, in-patient mental facilities. I came up with this one: https://portal.ct.gov/DMHAS/WFH/Whiting-Forensic-Hospital https://ctmirror.org/2020/10/13/more-like-a-prison-than-it-is-a-hospital-whiting-cvh-patients-testify-before-task-force/ https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/local/suit-wants-high-security-wing-at-whiting-forensic-hospital-to-stay-open/2502477/
