If there’s a silver lining to Pennhurst, its dark legacy changed the way the American legal system, as well as society, treats those with special needs.
Audre Lorde, Keith Haring, Bruce Lee, chance, love, black holes, constraint as a catalyst of creativity, and a whisper of Whitman.
Explore 40 of the world's spookiest destinations around the world, from haunted hotels, to abandoned ghost towns, and haunted asylums.
“Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity.”
Every face tells a story. Every picture expresses what the photographer wanted to show. These potraits are of inmates at West Riding Asylum, in Yorkshire, England. Taken around 1869, the images are captivating. Each face is life misunderstood. And shackled.
“Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws.”
“Attention without feeling … is only a report.”
These haunting portraits captured by Dr Hugh Welch Diamond between 1848 and 1858 give an insight into the lives of the women forced to live out their years at Suffolk County Lunatic Asylum.
Reasons for being admitted into an asylum in the late 1800s include "laziness" and "masturbation."
These haunting portraits captured by Dr Hugh Welch Diamond between 1848 and 1858 give an insight into the lives of the women forced to live out their years at Suffolk County Lunatic Asylum.
“This is an extraordinary time full of vital, transformative movements that could not be foreseen. It’s also a nightmarish time. Full engagement requires the ability to perceive both.…
Savor some excerpts from A Velocity of Being here. One of the great cruelties and great glories of creative work is the wild discrepancy of timelines between vision and execution. When we dream up …
Read some excerpts from Figuring here. I have composed a book. It only took twelve years of The Marginalian and the most beautiful, difficult, disorienting experience of my personal life. Figuring …
“Some books are toolkits you take up to fix things, from the most practical to the most mysterious, from your house to your heart… Some books are medicine, bitter but clarifying.”
POWERFUL portraits capture what patients looked like in Britain’s most notorious mental asylum. Victorian photographer Henry Hering is the man behind the eye-opening snaps, which put a face to some…
Nel 1796 il filantropo William Tuke aprì il Ritiro di York, in Inghilterra, un ospedale per la cura dei malati di mente. Prima di allora, le persone con problemi mentali o comportamentali erano rinchiusi in istituti che assomigliavano più a gironi infernali che ad ospedali, il più famigerato dei quali era il Bethlem Royal Hospital. Tuke, di fede quaqquera, credeva nella santità della vita e nella compassione verso tutta l'umanità: questo lo portò a costruire un ospedale dove i malati di mente non subivano più violenze, ma cure adeguate, almeno per l'epoca. Ispirato al Ritiro, il West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum ha aperto le sue porte nel 1818, come luogo per ospitare malati di mente "poveri". L'asilo è stato esemplare per il suo tempo, in grado di ospitare 1.000 detenuti e curare le loro manie. L'ospedale era completamente autosufficiente e costruito per mantenere i malati isolati dal mondo esterno. Mentre le condizioni all'interno del manicomio erano nettamente migliori che in altre strutture, i ricoverati dovevano però ancora subire una totale disumanizzazione, connaturata al modo di affrontare le patologie mentali in quell'epoca. La prova di questa perdita di umanità può essere percepita nello sguardo di molti detenuti: invece dei loro nomi, il personale ha scritto nei ritratti la loro condizione mentale diagnosticata. Alcuni dei pazienti soffrono di "mono-mania", l'ossessione per una cosa o un'idea, pur essendo altrimenti sani di mente. Per altri la diagnosi é "mono-mania di orgoglio", credere cioè di essere figure di importanza storica; la "mania del sospetto" era quella che oggi chiamiamo paranoia. Questi ritratti sono l'unico ricordo rimasto dei poveri malati: la perdita acuta di sé, palese in queste foto scattate attorno al 1869, é inquietante, quasi indescrivibile. Acuta malinconia Mono-mania di orgoglio Demenza consecutiva Mania cronica Mania di sospetto Demenza senile Semplicemente un prigioniero Demenza consecutiva Mania semplice Imbecillità Demenza organica Paralisi generale Mono-mania di orgoglio
Haunting photographs show some of the women who attended the infamous Bethlem Royal Hospital in Bromley, south east London, where patients were 'treated' by being spun round in a chair.
“For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. Remember?”
How your memories impact your immune system, why moving is one of the most stressful life-events, and what your parents have to do with your predisposition to PTSD.
A list documents the myriad reasons why people were committed to insane asylums in the 19th century.
Explore Jamie Betts Photo's 962 photos on Flickr!
These are the haunting portraits of children taken at an 'imbecile asylum' by their doctor after they were rejected for being 'mentally-disabled'.
“Anxiety is love’s greatest killer.”
An annual charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry. Highlights from the previous seasons can be seen here. The Universe in Verse is now a book. …
“People could be admitted to the asylum as a lunatic patient by a number of means: At the request of a friend, relative or acquaintance, with medical certificates written by two medical pract…
West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum in Wakefield opened its doors in 1818 as a place to house “paupers” with mental illness in the UK. The asylum was exemplary for the time, built to house 1000 inmates and cure them of their manias. The following series of photos were taken circa 1869 of patients at the […]
The images, taken between 1878 and 1910, were captured at the infamous Salpetriere Hospital in Paris, France.
These Victorian photographic portraits show the deranged killers, such as murdering artist Richard Dadd, who were among the first patients at Broadmoor, which opened 150 years ago.
Authorized exploration and photographs from and inebriate asylum in Binghamton, NY
You might be suprised by the reasons for admission to the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum from 1864-1889. Exposure and quackery, anyone?
Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond was one of the most important figures in early British photography. He made his first photographs in April 1839, just three months after the announcement of photography’s invention. In the 1840s he befriended one of his patients, Frederick Scott Archer and subsequently became one of the first people to use Archer’s collodion process. In May 1856 Diamond presented a paper to the Society called 'On the Application of Photography to the Physiognomy and Mental Phenomena of Insanity' when he was a physician at the Surrey County Asylum and Secretary to the Photographic Society of London. Diamond stated that photography was invaluable in the treatment of mental illness. He proposed that by studying the faces of patients, physicians could identify and diagnose mental complaints. These beliefs were rooted in the pseudoscience of physiognomy, where the face was seen as the mirror of the soul. For Diamond, the faces of the patients represented 'types' of mental illness such as melancholia and delusional paranoia. (via National Media Museum)
