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Get ready for you Friday night horror flick. This is guaranteed to be more disturbing than any insane asylum horror movie you’ve ever seen. This is a real look into an institution for the criminally insane in the 60’s, and it will be stomach turning at times. (I have added a history and commentary below that I find relevant to the troubled teen programs by Thomas Szasz concerning the issue of Therapeutic Censorship in the institution.)
If you don’t think you can handle watching scenes of depravity, inhumanity, and bizarre circumstances in which the people are held under in this film… don’t watch…..
Titicut Follies : Frederick Wiseman
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 009864980# Therapeutic Censorship (and Titicut Follies): Thomas Szasz
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns ... ensorship/
……. we in the United States take for granted the government’s right, indeed its duty, to prohibit persons from expressing opinions deemed to be the products of “mental illness.” An American has the right to deny the Holocaust but not the right to deny his identity and declare he is Jesus. The person who does that is diagnosed as having schizophrenia, being “dangerous to himself and others,” and incarcerated in a “hospital.” This type of deprivation of liberty is not considered a violation of the First Amendment because psychiatric commitment is defined as a civil, not criminal, procedure, its ostensible purpose being therapy not punishment.
This is familiar territory. Much less familiar is an episode in which organized psychiatry was responsible for a different kind of limitation of free speech, one I call “therapeutic censorship.” The Titicut Follies
In the 1960s, documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman received permission to film for 29 days inside the Bridgewater State Hospital, a Massachusetts institution for the criminally insane. The movie he made there—his first documentary—was shown to great acclaim at the New York Film Festival in 1967. The Massachusetts attorney general proceeded to bar public screenings, and the state’s Supreme Court ruled that the movie constituted an invasion of the privacy of the Bridgewater guards and patients. The film was banned……..
….. [It] is the only American film ever censored for reasons other than obscenity or national security.
Dehumanization of Mad Persons
The Titicut Follies, unlike One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, was a unique film. It depicted in gripping pictorial detail the psychiatric invalidation, persecution, and dehumanization of so-called mad persons at the hands of so-called mental-health professionals. For that offense, the American psychiatric establishment, assisted by the American legal establishment, banned the showing of the film. This unique violation of the First Amendment has escaped both legal and psychiatric attention……..
In the old days of insane asylums, the truth about psychiatry was apparent: the madhouse was a snake pit, and snake pits were limited to insane asylums. Today’s snake pits—dispersed throughout society—are concealed by a façade of pseudomedical diagnoses, therapies, treatment-advocacy centers, alliances for the mentally ill, and the renaming of insane asylums as “health care facilities.”
