Reference Boards for Insane Asylum

Insane asylums. Or for the more politically correct among us, mental hospitals. If you're feeling particularly euphemistic you can call them what the government does - state hospitals. State hospitals are where you were sent when your mind wasn't working right. Makes it sound positively Orwellian doesn't it?

Researching insane asylums is not pleasant business. Just when you think you've imagined the worst thing ever about them, reality comes along and puts you to shame. Really, it all makes One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest seem tame and Nurse Racket look nice.

For instance, there were such things as orphan asylums. These are where you went if you happened to be an orphan and had behavioral problems or if your parents just didn't like you. Children as young as 4 were committed. Apparently you can be insane before you know how to tie your shoes. Rest assured, you most certainly would be insane by the time they let you out. Orphan asylums seemed to have a remarkable record of curing nearly all their patients on their eighteenth birthdays. Provided they lived that long. Deaths in solitary confinement were startlingly common for a padded room. And the windows didn't have wire mesh over them to keep patients from escaping, but from smashing the glass and using it to slit their wrists. It is not for nothing that a little girl features in my major objects reference board above.

As seen in my assets reference board, pharmaceutical drugs became available to treat mental patients in the 1950s, chief among them being Thorazine. This was often abused to keep the patients in a docile and drugged haze, but it was far better than what patients had endured previously. Lobotomies, submersion in ice water, whipping and beating to stop epileptics from having seizures, it was all fair game. My great grandmother worked as a nurse in an asylum before she married, and she shuddered to relate to me once that the Chief of Staff of the hospital where she worked had a theory that pain could cause a mental patient to focus their mind and regain some clarity. She described his "treatment" sessions as little more than excuses for torture, and said she couldn't stand to stay in the room. This was during the 1930s. And of course there is the infamous electro-convulsive shock therapy, still used today to treat some cases of severe depression.

Finally we move to my texture reference board. You will notice a color theme here if you missed it in the previous boards. White, more white, and a little bit of the blue-green color hospitals are fond of using that seems to be conducive to nothing so much as nausea. You'll notice my fine collection of cloth textures - crumpled cotton, starched cotton, clean cotton, dirty cotton. All white, of course. Just like the ensemble of the hospital orderly - white shirt, white slacks, white web belt, white socks, white shoes, with an optional white bow tie.

White is calming, sure. But nothing but white starts to become a little terrifying. A guy could go crazy staring at all that nothing.

Rest assured, soon you will see some character designs coming out of all this misery. And yes, I have a feeling they will be wearing white - be they doctor, patient, nurse, orderly, or an animate piece of wall. Heaven help me.