"In its most overt and egregious form, stigma results in outright discrimination and abuse. More tragically it deprives people of their dignity and interferes with their full participation in society." (The Surgeon General's Report on Mental Health, 2000)
Since the dawn of civilization, human beings have needed scapegoats. In fact, according to Judeo-Christian theology, Adam was the first person in search of a scapegoat when he bemoaned: "The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, SHE gave me of the tree, and I did eat!" Individuals who are basically humanitarian and who tend to be tolerant of other peoples, have bought into the scapegoat mentality when assailed by media manipulators preying upon the fears of society. In Ancient Greece, whenever there was a plague, "the mentally-ill" were forced to live on the outskirts of town (ancient history's version of the homeless?) and were stoned to death as part of the ritual purification of the city. This ritual purification was called "pharmakos" and is the root source of our modern day word pharmaceutical. During the witch-craze of the Middle Ages it was widely believed that "the mentally-ill" were possessed by demons and evil spirits and with the publication of the infamous witchfinders manual, the "Malleus Maleficarum" in 1489, various symptoms of "mental illness" were ascribed to possession. Many people may not be aware of the fact that the psychiatric term "mania", is actually the name of an ancient Roman Goddess of hell. In fact, it was a common practice during the Middle Ages for mad-doctors to chisel a hole into the skulls of their patients to - "let the devil escape!" This conveniently opened the door for society to criminalize it's "mentally-ill" and to rid itself of it's undesirables. I don't believe it would be unreasonable of me to suggest that thousands, if not tens of thousands, of those people who were chained in dungeons and burnt at the stake by the Inquisition were people whom our society labels "mentally-ill". Today those dungeons have been replaced by the psychiatric ward and the stake has been replaced by the hypodermic needle. This is called "involuntary outpatient commitment" or "Kendra's Law".
"Until quite recent times, it was universally believed that bad weather, diseases of cattle and sexual impotence, could be, and in many cases were, caused by the malevolent operations of magicians. To catch and kill magicians was therefore a duty... The system of ethics and law that were based upon this erroneous view of the nature of things were the cause of the most appalling evils. The orgy of spying, lynching, and judicial murder, which these wrong views about magic made logical and mandatory, was not matched until our own days, when the Communist ethic, based upon erroneous views about economics, and the Nazi ethic, based upon erroneous views about race, commanded and justified atrocities on an even greater scale." (Brave New World Revisited, Chapter XI).
In the 16th and 17th centuries, people were obsessed with the concept of mental illness. This is evident throughout Shakespeare's plays, but is especially evident throughout his play "Hamlet." In 1547, Henry VIII handed over to the city of London the Priory of St. Mary of Bethlehem (which became the infamous Bedlam Hospital) for the express purpose of housing "mental patients." The conditions inside this hospital were harsh and inhumane. The building was incredibly dirty as the patients were made to wallow in their own filth. They were often chained to the walls doused in cold water until they were near drowning and spun violently in a rotating chair. The administrators of the hospital would charge admission to the general public to come and gawk at the patients who were often naked and catatonic. According to "The History of Psychiatry" by Dr. Franz G. Alexander and Dr. Sheldon T. Selesnick: "Should they survive the filthy conditions, the abominable food, the isolation and darkness, and the brutality of their keepers, the patients of Bedlam were entitled to treatment," including bloodletting and various "so-called harmless tortures." ("The History of Psychiatry", page 114). Dr. Issac Hawes, a 17th century doctor noted: "Nothing is more necessary for the recovery of lunatics than forcing them to respect fear. This is why maniacs recover much sooner if they are treated with torture instead of with medicines." In contrast, the following century English novelist Daniel Defoe wrote: "If they are not mad when they go into these accursed houses, they are soon made so by the barbarous usage they suffer there." Bedlam has now become synonymous with chaos and confusion and at it's peak, Bedlam rivaled the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey in terms of tourist popularity. In medieval art and medical texts "the mentally-ill" were always portrayed as rabid, unkempt, frenzied and disheveled.
Prior to the Jewish Holocaust, the first people to lose their rights in Nazi Germany were the physically and the psychiatrically disabled. Through no fault of their own, a nation of people disgruntled by the hardships imposed upon them by the Treaty of Versailles were easily seduced by Nazi propaganda to believe that certain segments of the society were responsible for their hardships. The "mentally-ill" were one segment of the population who were "scapegoated" and so in 1939, Heinrich Himmler, head of the notorious S.S. ordered that all those who were a "burden on the society" were to be exterminated. This was called euthanasia and thousands of psychiatric "inmates" (a term traditionally associated with criminals) were chosen to set the stage in a practical and ideological way for the eventual extermination of 6 million Jews. Heinrich Himmler and Ernst Rudin, a psychiatrist from Munich University who gained notoriety as "one of the most evil men in Germany," drew up Germany's 1933 sterilization law which called for the sterilization of all Jews and "colored" German children. Dr. Rudin proposed that psychiatry should take the lead in purifying the race thereby ensuring that "genetically defective persons shall not be able to propagate." In 1971, in an eerie case of history almost repeating itself in Detroit, a Dr. Ernst Rodin, head of the neurology department at the Lafayette clinic (who believed that young black males were prone to violence and strongly advocated for the control of such violence through the use of psychosurgery and castration) said that "medical technology" should be applied to solve the problem of riots in black ghettos. Highly reminiscent of the "medical technology" applied to the Jewish ghettos of Nazi Germany. Contrary to popular belief, however, the first gas chambers did not open up in Auschwitz. The first gas chambers opened up in Brandenberg in 1939, one of six camps operated in Nazi Germany for exterminating "mental patients." Two years later in 1941 Auschwitz was launched and in September of 1941, the first official gassing took place there. The victims being 250 "mental patients" and 600 Russians and Jews. Doctor and author Fredric Wertham reports in his book "A Sign for Cain" that in 1941 the Hadamar psychiatric institution "celebrated the cremation of it's ten thousandth mental patient." (A Sign for Cain: An Exploration of Human Violence, Fredric Wertham, M.D., 1966, Page 157). By the end of World War II, approximately 300,000 "psychiatric inmates" were killed by gassing, starvation, injection of deadly "research" drugs and other ghastly experiments.
HARBINGERS OF CINEMANIA
While film was extensively used to promote Nazi propaganda, nowhere was it as grotesque as in the push to exterminate thousands of people labeled "mentally-ill". Between 1935 and 1937 various films were produced that promoted the sterilization of people with "mental illness". Films such as "Sins of the Fathers" and "Straying from the Path" used close-up shots to capture contorted movements and unconventional grimaces and used various lighting techniques to emphasize the bizarre and unusual character of the subjects. Flickering lights which created wild shadows accentuated the stunned expression of the subjects in an attempt to provoke fear in the viewing audience. The use of this cheap expressionism was highlighted in Michael Burleigh's authoritative volume on "euthanasia" and "the killing films" in Nazi Germany. In 1939 Hitler's Chancellory commissioned director Hermann Schweninger to produce a feature-length documentary about the plight of "mental patients" and the need to dispose of them. He filmed in over twenty insititutions searching for particularly crass examples of "the mentally-ill". But this filming went beyond the "apparent unworthiness" of it's subjects, actually showing what was done to dispose of them. Some of this footage survived the war and was shown to the presiding judge of the U.S. military tribunal in Nuremburg, who declined to show the footage to the jury for fear that they "might collapse!" Between 1939 and 1941 German pyschiatrists produced a film called "The Mentally-Ill" which presented the pros and cons of electroshock and gassing procedures. This film details the false notion of "curing the mentally-ill" with electroshock and proposes gassing them to death as the only other alternative. More people were killed during World War II than during the entire known history of human warfare. How ironic that one of the key people responsible for putting a stop to this mindless war machine was someone who had a psychiatric diagnosis himself, Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill. Horrors of this magnitude usually start with what seems to be at first glance a meaningless and unimportant footnote (in this case the extermination of "the mentally-ill"). Unfortunately, however, once the escalation begins, it's usually too late for anyone to do anything about it. Today that war propaganda has been replaced by the media propaganda I refer to as "CineMania", and one of the most important lessons I ever learned in high school was that "those who don't learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them." Is this just an omen of things to come? Prophecy, "they say", has a way of fulfilling itself... and someday in the not too distant future the destruction of this entire planet will be laid at our own individual doorsteps. Poetically etched, in silent commemoration, upon the final pages of mankind's history will be the somber words: "At long last the guiltless, have finally slaughtered the guiltless." But, of course, there won't be anyone around to read it!!! David@seecinemania.com
"On close examination there seems to be two kinds of madness... There is what could be called "clinical madness", which describes those who simply give up, throw in the towel, and insulate themselves from the rest of the world... But there is another kind of madness portrayed by [Elie] Wiesel, what some have called "moral madness"... Mosche, the "madman," was so described because he told people that Jews were being cremated, when everybody knew that such things don't happen in the twentieth century. Wiesel suggests, in other words, that the attitude which the world calls madness, may in fact be true sanity, seeing things as they really are, refusing to accept the values and patterns and standards that were regnant in Europe at that time. Such persons may have had a higher degree of sanity than those around them who called them mad." (When Man and God Failed: Non-Jewish Views of the Holocaust, Harry James Cargas, PH.D., Macmillan)
Why Do Stories Like These Consistently Make Front-Page Headlines, Yet, Not One Member of The Media Felt That The Following September 11th Story was Worthy of Mention? Is the Media Afraid That it's Bias Might be Exposed?
On Tuesday, September 11th, 2001, immediately following the attack on the World Trade Center Towers, while most of the offices around them were shutting down and "heading for the hills", Sandra Lowe, the Director of Community Access's Employment and Training Center (a mental health community service agency which is located four blocks away from "ground zero") refused to evacuate and close her doors, and instead, the training center became a sanctuary of refuge for hundreds of stunned survivors who were frightened, confused and disoriented. Within minutes, those very people whom the media typically portrays as violent and deranged were on the front lines offering support and providing comfort in this time of dire need. Even the NYPD and Fire Department personnel were directing debris-laden victims to the center. The cruel irony of this story is that, with all of the heroes who were being recognized and honored on a daily basis following this disaster, not one member of the media felt that this was a story worthy of mention. Why has no national media conglomerate come forward to report this story? Is it because then there would be no one left to conveniently scapegoat? Or is it because then the American taxpayers might get wind of the fact that their hard-earned tax dollars are being squandered on forced "treatment" and incarceration, which only re-traumatizes "the mentally-ill", thereby justifying the need for more of their hard-earned tax dollars? 1/1/02
The primary motive behind SeeCineMania was to provide an open forum for meaningful dialogue. If CineMania has been helpful to you in any way, please take a moment to share your views with us (whether you agree - or disagree) on the CineMania Message Board.
For additional sources of information about stigma and the media's portrayal of mental illness please logon to the following websites: The National Stigma Clearinghouse website was created by Jean Arnold, a community activist, and Nora Weinerth, a communications consultant, to track stigmatizing stereotypes of mental illness and to provide up-to-date information about stigma. http://community.webtv.net/stigmanet
The Guide to Stigma Busters Website was designed by Mr. Otto Wahl who is a Professor of Psychology at George Mason University in Fairfax Virginia. He is the author of "Telling is Risky Business: Mental Health Consumers Confront Stigma" and "Media Madness: Public Images of Mental Illness" which details in-depth the media portrayal of mental illness. The site also contains numerous links to other practical, useful and up-to-date information. http://www.iso.gmu.edu/~owahl/INDEX.HTM
This past March (2001) "On Our Own" of Baltimore, Maryland, hosted a National Mental Health Symposium to Address Discrimination and Stigma. The symposium was joined by the Surgeon General, leading anti-stigma experts, and members of the media to formulate a blueprint for confronting and eliminating stigma. www.onourownmd.org
The Chicago Consortium for Stigma Research (CCSR) is dedicated to understanding the phenomenon of stigma, testing models that explain why it occurs, and evaluating strategies that help to diminish it's effects. Their special focus is on understanding the stigma of mental illness. The consortium is a multi-disciplinary group and seeks partners at all levels to advance stigma research. www.stigmaresearch.org
RECOMMENDED READING:
"Mass Murderers in White Coats" by Lenny Lapon: Survivor and activist Lenny Lapon documents the mass murder of "mental patients" in Nazi Germany and reveals how the extermination of thousands of psychiatric "inmates" set the stage in a practical and ideological way for the eventual extermination of six million Jews. Other Holocaust researchers rarely acknowledge the importance of this fact.
"Media Madness: Public Images of Mental Illness" by Dr. Otto Wahl: This book details the many ways in which mass media portrays people with psychiatric disabilities. Dr. Wahl takes an in-depth look at the inaccurate stereotypes created by newspapers, books, advertisements, movies and television. Media Madness was nominated by the Gustavus Myers Center for Human Rights as "an outstanding book on human rights in North America." Dr. Wahl is a Professor of Psychology at George Mason University.
"Milledgeville! The Inside Story of the World's Largest Insane Asylum" by Dr. Peter G. Cranford: A fascinating yet scholarly expose of Milledgeville by its "Father Confessor." Here are 2 of my favorite "Patient Wisdom" quotes: 1. Before you lock us up, take a long look at those who bring us in. 2. There is great talk about recovery, but when you do get normal and express yourself, you're a patient again and they promptly slap you down."
"A Mind That Found Itself" by Clifford W. Beers: This classic autobiography relates the story of a Yale graduate who is gradually overcome by "mental illness." His well-meaning family commits him to a series of insane asylums, but he is brutalized by their treatment, and his moments of fleeting sanity are fewer and fewer. His ultimate recovery is a triumph of the human spirit. Did for the American mental health system what Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" did for the American Revolution. Sign the CineMania Guestbook
