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We look to three sources, a movie (The Mountain), a documentary film (The Lobotomist), and a nonfiction book (Desperate Remedies), for perspectives on human fallibility and folly in American asylum psychiatry during the first half of the 20th century. We focus in particular on the consequences of the overconfidence asylum psychiatry exhibited, the problem of medical knowledge in play, and the vulnerability of affected people from an absence of agency. These sources pointed to lobotomies, dental extractions, abdominal eviscerations, insulin comas, and other like illustrative interventions as case studies of what were once hailed as best medical practices that became horrors later. Recognizing that human fallibility and folly are an unchangeable feature of the human condition, we muse about whether we are any less exposed to such horrors today and forever.

Content Sources:

The Mountain – writer / director Rick Alverson, Vice Studios, 2018.

The Lobotomist – writer Barak Goodman, producers and directors Barak Goodman and John Maggio / American Experience (PBS) /available online at Vimeo, 2008.

Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness ­­– author Andrew Scull / Belknap, 2022.

Audio clips from the documentary film, The Lobotomist, credits here.

Links:

Russell Teagarden’s blog pieces at According to the Arts on The Mountain and Desperate Remedies.

Other related blog pieces at According to the Arts:

Civilization and Madness: A History of Madness in the Age of Reason, Michel Foucault

Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception, Michel Foucault

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, Maggie O’Farrell

The Lobotomist is available online at Vimeo.

Francisco Goya’s painting referenced in the episode, The Madhouse.


Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to: russell.teagarden@theclinicandtheperson.com.

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Executive producer: Anne Bentley