In 1973, a charismatic doctor convinced 8 healthy people to commit themselves to mental hospitals. They had to prove their sanity to be set free. Their undercover mission would change our understanding of madness forever.

You may wonder why anyone would willingly commit themselves to a mental hospital in the first place. In this blog, I will show the horror of mental institutions and why we do not have them anymore. I call this “Funny Farm”; but like funny bones, it’s no laughing matter.

Like the song, “They’re coming to take me away,” where life is beautiful all the time, and I’ll be happy to see those nice young men in their clean white coats. Believe me mental institution is nothing like that song.

For centuries, doctors have struggled to define mental illness-how do you diagnose it, how do you treat it, how do you even know what it is?

You’d have to be crazy to get yourself committed to a mental hospital.

Psychiatry, as a distinct branch of medicine, has come far in its short life span. The field has rejected the shameful practices of the recent past-the lobotomies, forced sterilizations, human warehousing. Today’s psychiatrists boast a varied arsenal of effective drugs and have largely dropped the unscientific trappings of psychoanalytic psychobabble, the “schizophrenogenic” or “refrigerator” mothers of yesteryear who had been blamed for triggering insanity in their offspring.

I’ve seen firsthand when I was a child visiting my one brother, who was sent to Jamestown State Hospital in North Dakota. They had him drugged so bad, that he was slobbering when the family took him out for a day.

When a person thinks of mental institutions, you think about the movie, “One flew over the Cuckoo Nest.” There is a lot of screaming and abuse that goes on in these mental institutions. Some of these buildings are now haunted because of the abuse. Those that were patients there and eventually died in them, their ghosts are haunting those buildings to this day.

So what is mental illness? The question of how to separate sanity from insanity, of how to even define mental illness, rises above semantics, and above deciding what kind of specialist will care for you or your loved one during a time of intense need.

Psychiatry makes judgements about people-about our personalities, our beliefs, our morality. It is a mirror held up to society in which it is practiced.

Have we been looking at mental illness all wrong?

Once declared insane, you could permanently lose custody of your children, property, and rights to inheritance. Many would remain locked away for a long time, if not the rest of their lives.

Madness has been dogging humanity for as long as humans have been able to record their own history.

Doctors began to slice and dice their way through “insane” brains. They removed living people’s thyroids, women’s ovaries, and men’s seminal vesicles based on half baked theories about the genetic origins of madness.

In America, 32 states passed forced sterilization laws between 1907 and 1937-why not stop the spread of undesirables, they thought, by cutting off their ability to reproduce.

Rosemary Kennedy was a famous person who had that done to her by her parents and put into a mental institution. Her siblings were kept in the dark about it too.

I had a co-worker, I worked with years ago, when she was a child, her mother had the procedure done to her to keep her from reproducing. Knowing her, there was no real reason for her mother to have done that to her.

In 1967, when Ronald Reagan was governor of California, he passed several acts that hastened the demise of the institutions across the state-and the eventually the rest of the country soon followed.

Years ago, anyone with a disability, mental or physical were put away as a disgrace. Some were even aborted. Some adoption agency didn’t want handicapped people to be adopted. Before my Uncle and Aunt got their one son, the adoption agency didn’t want them to adopt him; but thank God, they adopt him anyway. He has Cerebral Palsy; despite being diagnose with that, he is able to do a lot of things.

Even actor John Ritter, has a brother, who also had Cerebral Palsy. Tex Ritter and his wife kept that from John growing up.

I had a sister, who recently passed away, who had dementia. Toward the end of her life, she had drifted back to a childlike state. I witnessed that firsthand. She was older than me, but because of her dementia, she was leaning on me like a child.

Because of witnessing firsthand her dementia, you can’t tell me that Joe Biden doesn’t have dementia himself. Believe me, the signs are there, if no one else want to believe it or not.

I had volunteered in helping Special Olympics bowling tournaments, and believe me, it was privilege to do so. Seeing people with handicap, physical or mental being productive in our society is something special; instead of having them locked away in a mental institution. Some of them even have very strong faith, and to watch them worship is amazing.

I may not have the patient to really work with them full time, because you will need lots of patience to do so. Even though, they may have an illness, they seems to be better off than some of the stupid people out there who are normal but does stupid things.

I’m glad that these mental institutions of the past are closed now and people with handicaps are becoming productive citizens rather than being locked up.