The Foetid Halls Ginsberg Essay Research Paper — страница 3

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electroshock’s past live on and the procedure still sparks considerable debate. Writing in the November 1998 issue of USA Today Magazine, Jan Eastgate, president of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International, warns readers of the continued dangers of ECT: “For years, mothers have been telling children not to put their fingers in electrical outlets. Psychiatrists expect you to put your brain in one. Any five year old knows better” (Eastgate 30). Lobotomies and Electroshock in Literature and Movies The human toll of these new psychiatric procedures became the stuff of Hollywood. Dark stories of human destruction at the hands of science gone astray seemed ready made for moviemakers. In 1962, Ken Kesey, another American Beat poet, wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s

Nest, a dark tale of a mental hospital where electroshock and pills are used as punishment and control tools, instead of being used to help the patients return to sanity (KKMP). Kesey had a deep history of involvement in the Beat movement, traveling with fellow beat poet Neal Cassady and linking up in San Francisco with Allen Ginsberg, as part of Kesey’s Acid Test Festivals (Asher). In 1959, Kesey volunteered to participate in government LSD testing while a graduate student at Stanford University (KKMP). Kesey’s novel tells the story of McMurphy, a rebellious prison inmate with a history of escapes who is placed in a mental hospital and breaks the monotony of the dreary environment with pranks and rebellious stunts. McMurphy, played by Nicholson, was eventually lobotomized by

staff members tired of dealing with his rebellious, but usually harmless acts, and was later killed by another patient in the hospital (Adull). Critically acclaimed, Kesey’s novel would be turned into a movie version in 1975, which starred Jack Nicholson and Danny DeVito (Shorter 283). The story of Frances Farmer would also live on in the entertainment world. Her life’s story would reach the big screen in the movie “Farmer”, starring Jessica Lange. The 1990’s rock band, Nirvana, recorded the song “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle” (Sabbatini). Conspiracy Theories: The Nazi and CIA Experiments While many in the mental health fields were working towards the goal of improving the lives of their patients, some had a more sinister agenda behind their

research. Both the Nazi German government and the American Central Intelligence Agency conducted psychiatric experiments upon human subjects in years past. Nazi Germany conducted a number of experiments with psychiatric medicine. German psychiatrists used film footage of electroshock tests in a movie entitled “The Mentally Ill”, which attempted to portray the mentally ill as incurable and justify their execution by poison gas, as a prelude to the horrors of Hitler’s “Final Solution” (Eastgate 29). During the Nuremberg trials at the end of World War II, the American electroshock pioneer, Leo Alexander, returned to Germany to question Nazi doctors and studied their research as a consultant to the Allied war crime prosecutors. In 1945, he published these findings in his

report, “Public Mental Health Practices in Germany: Sterilization and Execution of Patients Suffering from Nervous or Mental Disease” (Eastgate 29). On August 20, 1947, the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal handed down sentences in what became known as the Doctors Trial. Seven doctors were sentenced to death by hanging, and six others were given prison sentences, up to life terms. Seven other indicted doctors were found not guilty (TDTS). The first official United States government effort in exploring mind control techniques was code-named Bluebird in 1950 (Weinstein 128). Project Artichoke followed Bluebird in 1953, which then evolved into Project MKULTRA (Weinstein 129). MKULTRA was a CIA-funded mind control research project that lasted from 1957 until 1961. Conducted under Dr.

Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, this project covered a broad range of experiments in mind control techniques (Weinstein xvii). Much of Cameron’s research into changing behavior was based upon finding the tools to return a patient to more primitive and childlike behavioral state, then rebuild the patient by introducing new behavioral patterns (Weinstein 110). Cameron had written a paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1953, where he argued the theory of “driving”, where a properly-conditioned patient could be controlled and directed with simple, regularly played audio tapes (Weinstein 131). To open his patients’ minds to suggestion, Cameron employed a number of approaches to produce a sense of disinhibition