#thoughts from the asylum

[t4t-fagdyke]

oh? homosexuality and transgenderism are a mental illnesses? guess you’ll have to lock me in a padded room in a straight jacket along with all the other trans homos ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[thewornoutandtired]

Waking Up

When I first woke up, nothing looked familiar. I wasn't in my room, or a classroom, or any of my friends' houses. The bed felt uncomfortable under me, like it was much thinner than any of my other ones. I finally opened my eyes, looking up at a ceiling that was dimly lit by a light I couldn't see. The bare, off-white ceiling had a brownish stain on it that my half-asleep brain told me was an eevee.

Wait? Where the fuck am I?

The realization hit me like a freight train, and I sat up quick enough that I got dizzy for a second. As I fought the gnaw of panic inside me, I took in my surroundings.

The entire room was the same off-white color, save the fake wood flooring. I was laying in a twin bed in one corner, my feet hanging off the end, with a single sheet and blanket covering me. There were two chairs against the wall opposite me with a nightstand between myself and them, a window with built-in shades just past the foot of my bed, a nightlight built into the far-right corner, and a door with a little window in the far left. The room had no decorations, no electronics, no signage or any clue as to where I was.

Where the hell was I? The last thing I could remember was...getting into a fight? I remembered yelling, arguing with someone or someones, and then everything was black. My arms hurt, but I couldn't remember how I had injured them.

I tried to crawl out of bed, and realized that my right wrist wouldn't come with me. I pulled the covers back and saw a set of handcuffs locking chaining me to a rail on the bed. I also realized that I was wearing clothes I didn't recognize. I had never owned a pair of sweatpants or a t-shirt in this shade of grey. The long sleeves of shirt were really scratchy on the inside, like they had some kind of padding, and I figured that must be what was hurting me.

A shadow passed by the window, and I tried to call out to it. My voice was hoarse, like I had either been screaming nonstop or hadn't spoken in days. All that came out was a raspy croaking noise, but apparently it was enough. The door opened.

In walked an old woman wearing scrubs. She smiled at me as she flipped on the lights, but I saw it falter when she looked at my face. My rising panic must have been showing.

"How are you feeling, dearie?" She asked me. Her voice reminded me of my grandmother. It was soothing, and I could actually feel myself getting calmer.

"Where am I?" I managed to choke out, my voice still sounding like I'd been smoking since I was born.

"You're in the hospital, dearie, do you really not remember?" the nurse asked me, kneeling next to my bedside. She pulled a remote out of the nightstand as I shook my head. "I'm sorry for that, dearie. Would you like some water?"

I nodded enthusiastically at that, and the nurse pushed a button on the remote. It made a beeping noise, and she showed it to me.

"This here is a remote just for you. This one calls the nurse's station, these two control the temperature in your room, and this one is the nightlight.

A second nurse entered the room, this one a man who was probably in his thirties. He handed the nurse a cup of water and a smaller cup that rattled. The lady nurse handed me the water and let me take a couple of awkward sips using my left hand before she handed me the other one.

There were three pills in the cup, two oblong white ones and a circular blue one. I looked at the nurse in confusion, but she merely nodded.

"Take them please, dearie. It's important that you do."

I swallowed all three down, juggling the pill cup with the water cup before looking at the nurse again. "What were they?"

"One antipsychotic, one antidepressant, and one sedative." She said primly.

"You're knocking me out?"

"You're supposed to be out for another two days while your arms and insides heal, dearie. The next time you wake up, press the call button and either I or the doctor will come see you, okay?"

"Can I ask one more question?" I asked, already feeling groggy from the sedative.

"I suppose one more won't hurt." The nurse smiled kindly at me.

"Why am I chained to the bed?"

"Because you hurt people, dearie, and the police are afraid that you might escape or try to hurt me or someone else."

The shock from what she told me couldn't stop the chemicals from dragging me down, but her words did echo into my dreams.

[pyrrhum]

it’s old news but ds9 “the wire”, if nothing else, is good because it says that for the past 2 seasons, garak has been zonked, zooted, and absolutely torqued, which makes a STELLAR rewatch for any of his past scenes

[theauthor27]

The fuck is Arkham Asylum supposed to be

[lyxchen]

My current blorbo (Campbell Bain) and another very beloved blorbo of mine (Alex Mercer) have the same haircut!!<333

[aq2003]

ive decided to make a uquiz

[martyrbat]

okie finished the lets play of arkham city while knitting and. hm..

[ava-does-dumbassery]

Thinking about how a Victorian asylum would probably be an ideal hunting ground for a vampire (a vampire like Dracula or Carmilla, who tended to prey on young women, that is). They were full of young ladies (since a lot of families sent their daughters or wives there for being “disruptive” or “disobedient”), the patients wouldn’t be believed if they tried to tell someone about what was happening to them, and no one would really care about them dying. Just a whole bunch of incredibly vulnerable people gathered inside one building. Plus, would it really be that hard to convince someone already living in absolute hell to say “come in” to the mysterious voice at the window that promises them freedom?

Please someone stop me before I start having story ideas.

[kittylordinfinity]

*screaming crying slamming doors etc etc* guys what in the everloving fuck happened to the voidkin asylum while i was gone???

[clamorybus]

i don't wanna call that lobotomy tiktok misinfo, because it isn't really, it's just that thing where it's hard to condense history into a 1 minute clip without stripping some context

[mycological-mariner]

This song is fantastic for insomniatic boat lovers

[swagging-back-to]

whats even more repulsive about asylums is how they advertise themselves to people who are thinking of voluntary admission. they show these lucurious wards with spacious and deluxe rooms, computer halls, a large cafeteria, game rooms, community rooms where you can talk to others

and then in reality youre confined to a 4x6 room on a cot 20 hours every day. you eat plain penne pasta silently at childrens tables while the nurses prison guards stare at you to make sure you dont try socializing or stealing the silverware, thats your breakfast along with various pills. then you go back to your room and cry until it gets dark. and on certain days youre allowed to go sit silently in a room watching an old movie just to have some semblance of escapism. you cant even look at anyone else or the prison guards yell at you. then you get pumped full of your second or third dose of drugs for the day and try to fall asleep.

the only people youre allowed to talk to are the social workers who would ask you the same questions every few hours every single day. trying to prove youre lying about the abuse youre talking about, apparently.

[dontflirt]

will fulfill the rest of my deobi duties by end of day but for now I need to rest….

[astrofons-highderich]

I have so many ideas that would make interesting fma illustrations or comics (or fics if I could write lol) but instead of making them my brain just endlessly churns with very slightly differing heied meet cutes jfhgjhb

[noknowshame]

(to the tune of Girlfriend in a Coma) 🎵first wife in the attic I know, I know, it’s serious🎵

[onemistressandnomaster]

I was at the bookstore the other day, and I picked up a book in the u.s. history section entitled “the woman they could not silence” out of curiosity. it’s about a woman named elizabeth packard, whose husband imprisoned her in an insane asylum for disagreeing with him. I had never heard of this woman before, so I read the first few chapters and later googled her name. and like.....stories like this are so important in helping to raise feminist consciousness, and it’s wild to think how these kinds of things are just glossed over when it comes to early american feminism.

so for starters, elizabeth packard was well-educated, but when she was 19, her father committed her to an asylum for “brain fever,” which was attributed to her taxing her womanly mind with all of her studying and teaching. the author of the book speculated that elizabeth actually had meningitis, and that the “treatment” for brain fever (ie. locking elizabeth up in an asylum for six weeks and bleeding her) did more harm than help. then elizabeth got married, at the age of just 21, to a man fourteen years older than her, and who she only married because he was a friend of her dad’s and she wanted to please her parents. she was pretty insistent in her writings that she never loved him and he never loved her due to their completely incompatible personalities. her husband, theophilius, was a minister, and when they moved to illinois, he opened up his own church. elizabeth disagreed with her husband’s calvinist beliefs, though, and they also clashed over other issues like slavery (this was all happening pre-civil war; elizabeth was pro-abolition, theophilius was pro-slavery) and the rights of women (elizabeth thought women should be treated like human beings, theophilius did not). when elizabeth started making her opinions more and more publicly known, theophilius started spreading rumors that she was insane--and he was able to use the fact that she had spent time in an asylum to his advantage. eventually, he gathered a whole bunch of “testimony” from his church about elizabeth’s insanity, and he had elizabeth committed to the jacksonville insane asylum. 

and here’s the kicker--elizabeth argued that she couldn’t be admitted without a hearing, because that was the law. except that the law didn’t apply to married women--it specifically said that husbands could remand their wives to asylums, no questions asked, and the women had no right to challenge their imprisonment. and when elizabeth was being forced onto the train, she expected some of her friends in the community to help her. but only one person--another woman, a ms. blessings (I can’t remember her first name)--said anything in her defense, which was basically that if she were a man, she would fight to protect elizabeth’s rights. but all the men just shrugged their shoulders and allowed elizabeth to get carted off. and she spent three years in the asylum, constantly being berated by the doctors, who wanted her to admit that she was crazy for her religious and political views. and it was only when her by-now adult children demanded her release that they let her go--into the custody of her husband, who then locked her up in their house. and she was only able to escape that after a trial to determine her sanity, because while it was legal to send her to the asylum, it was illegal for theophilius to imprison her in their home. the “evidence” that theophilius presented for her insanity? arguing with him and trying to leave his church.

fortunately, she was found legally sane. unfortunately, theophilius sold all of her things, rented their house out, and skipped town, leaving her homeless and penniless. and she had no right to seek recompense for her stuff or for the loss of her minor children because married women were not entitled to any of that under illinois law. she became an activist for the rights of women and those in asylums and succeeded in getting legislation passed granting married women more rights under the law. but like.....I had never heard of her until finding that book, even though her story shows how deep the oppression of women goes. we think we’ve come so far, but we don’t even properly appreciate where we started. married women literally had no legal personhood for so long in this country and so many others!! there needs to be more attention paid to women’s history, to the women who have stood up and fought for their rights, and for the women who were silenced--because elizabeth packard was not the only woman in that asylum who had been sent there by a husband. how many women suffered? we shouldn’t forget them.