I Never Promised You a Rose Garden: Films & books about mental health, pschiatric hospitals etc.

Has there been a thread about this before?

Inspired by Kate's recent thread about nuclear apocalypse films of the early 80s, I remember as a kid being weirdly fascinated by mental illness and institutions, probably after seeing One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest on TV or something... there seemed to be streak of these kind of films & books, from the titular Rose Garden, to Sybil and others, right up through Cronenberg's Spider (which I loved) and Unsane with Claire Foy which was just okay

I realize that there may be ILXors who have personal experience with actual mental health issues and facilities and don't want this to be triggering, just interested in mostly fictional (and sensationalized) media that addresses these situations

Any others?

I feel like this is Lechera-bait and am excited for the replies.

Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl is really fascinating. It was published by/with the author's doctor, Marguerite Sechehaye, and the entries by "Renée" (whose real name was Louisa Duss) are interspersed with Sechehaye's analytic commentary. As I recall (and it's been decades), I found the commentary kind of hard to follow in that mid-20th-century psychoanalysis way, but the first-person account of experiencing schizophrenia was fascinating. There's one particular image from a recurring vision she had that has really stuck with me. (I just Googled to see if the reputation of that book has changed over the years since it was published in 1951, but can't really find much about it.)

I said fascinating twice there, substitute "compelling" for one of them plz.

just realized I misspelled psychiatric in the thread title, apologies

In terms of fictional accounts, I read both Woman On the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy and The Trick Is to Keep Breathing by Janice Galloway when I was pretty young, and they both stayed with me as incredibly formative works. Got to nip off the internet for a bit but just wanted to add them to the thread, can come back later and describe more if wanted.

there's obviously a lot of horror/thriller entries in this category like Session 9 and Shutter Island, wasn't really thinking about those but we can discuss as well

oh yeah bc i wanted to bring up nightmare on elm street 3: dream warriors

Oh I found the recurring vision I mentioned via a copy of the book at archive.org. It's what she calls "the Dream of the Needle," likely prompted in childhood by hearing the phrase "needle in a haystack":

Here is the dream: a barn, brilliantly illuminated by electricity. The walls painted white, smooth — smooth and shining. In the immensity, a needle — fine, pointed, hard, glittering in the light. The needle in the emptiness filled me with excruciating terror. Then a haystack fills up the emptiness and engulfs the needle. The haystack, small at first, swells and swells and in the center, the needle, endowed with tremendous electrical force, communicates its charge to the hay. The electrical current, the invasion by the hay, and the blinding light combine to augment the fear to a paroxysm of terror, and I wake up screaming, "The needle, the needle!"

The whole account is worth reading, but that image of the bright white barn with the needle really stuck with me as a representation of intense paranoia.

Shock Corridor
Bronson
Titicut Follies

oh just remembered Equus (1977) with Richard Burton, that one freaked me out as a kid

the first one the thread title evoked in my mind was Altman's Vincent & Theo.

Marat/Sade ftw

Bell Jar and the Yellow Wallpaper are the 2 obv ones

had no idea there was a film version! Apparently a real piece of shit

The Bell Jar holds a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on eight reviews

Coincidentally, I'm right now listening to a film podcast ("The Cine-Files") with the hosts currently discussing "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest"

I read an old paperback of The Snake Pit in my teenage years... can't remember all that much about it. Looks like there was a 1948 film version with Olivia de Havilland which I've never seen

I enjoyed that film The Dream Team with Michael Keaton and Christopher Lloyd when I was a kid, not sure how much or any of it would hold up now. Probably some offensive stuff.

Wow, I forgot about that movie entirely. I even feel like I have seen it more than once, both times likely over 35 years ago.

and of course Christopher Lloyd was also in Cuckoo's Nest

William Peter Blatty’s The Ninth Configuration is a pretty loopy asylum movie.

Girl, Interrupted

thank you for sharing that passage, tipsy. i love it.

Oh good! I realized after that the thread was more about fictional portrayals than non-fiction, but yeah, that is just such a striking image.

Tipsy, totally unfair and random question that is effectively asking you to declog my brain for me, but is that the book Frederic Jameson quotes from quite liberally in his postmodernism book? It feels familiar but I can't work out why.

Has there been a thread about this before?

Inspired by Kate's recent thread about nuclear apocalypse films of the early 80s, I remember as a kid being weirdly fascinated by mental illness and institutions, probably after seeing One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest on TV or something... there seemed to be streak of these kind of films & books, from the titular Rose Garden, to Sybil and others, right up through Cronenberg's Spider (which I loved) and Unsane with Claire Foy which was just okay

I realize that there may be ILXors who have personal experience with actual mental health issues and facilities and don't want this to be triggering, just interested in mostly fictional (and sensationalized) media that addresses these situations

Any others?

― Andy the Grasshopper

"rose garden" has a lot to answer for imo... first off more than anything else it shows how conceptions of mental health change over the years. when i was young that got called "schizophrenia" even though clinically people knew even then it wasn't schizophrenia. but people get their ideas about mental illness from, like, decades-old popular lit...

from what i can tell "rose garden" maps more closely to what gets called BPD today.. but again there's this kind of... i mean a lot of it is either trauma porn or inspiration porn, if you know either of those terms.

i don't think of it as a "mental illness" but there is definitely a history of bad autism representation. "rain man", haha.

i know of a lot more tv shows than i do movies. there's, what is it, "a beautiful mind"? oh that's the other one, the myth of the Mad Genius, including people who treat mental illness as a superpower. personally as someone who's dealt with severe, chronic mental illness, i don't see it that way.

oh, "girl interrupted", when my ex-girlfriend was inpatient she and the other people there read the book... my ex-girlfriend liked the book a lot. i read it too, i thought it was good, particularly for something that happened that long ago.

fwiw i don't find it triggering, i actually really like talking about these representations and how well they track with my own experiences and what i've seen!

Sybil, mentioned in the OP, is quite interesting but the book Sybil Exposed by Debbie Nathan is even more interesting. The book is basically a debunking of the movie.

I feel like this is Lechera-bait and am excited for the replies.

― Ima Gardener (in orbit), Thursday, March 13, 2025 12:44 PM (two days ago)

everyone got to my faves before me!

but i have read and watched all of these

i think the Bell Jar should be taught in school instead of Catcher in the Rye

Sybil Exposed is ESSENTIAL

i have had students absolutely obsessed w Girl Interrupted -- both the book and movie
i remember finding both kind of disappointing but I was already really into the genre at that point

IDK if Prozac Nation counts but that is one of the worst movie adaptations IMO

I watched the Bell Jar movie via a videotape from the library and don't remember much so it probably wasn't very good

the worst film that comes to mind when I saw this thread: Split. ridiculous that this utter bullshit could be released as recently as 2016, "let's take a relatively uncommon but certainly still misunderstood mental health diagnosis and make a serial killer film for the thrills." absolutely shameless and will certainly have contributed to people with a possible DID diagnosis feeling they can't speak about it or seek support they may need.

Tipsy, totally unfair and random question that is effectively asking you to declog my brain for me, but is that the book Frederic Jameson quotes from quite liberally in his postmodernism book?

I’m not versed in Jameson but yes, looks like he brings it into discussion of a breakdown in signifiers.

I know that 12 Monkeys is inherently sci-fi, but also deals with mental illness and institutions, yeah?

i don't think of it as a "mental illness" but there is definitely a history of bad autism representation. "rain man", haha

Kate, did you see A Brilliant Young Mind? (AKA 'X+Y' in the UK) Where the math prodigy kid is miraculously 'cured' of autism by the power of love?

I quite enjoyed Mad To Be Normal, the RD Laing biopic.

Kate, did you see A Brilliant Young Mind? (AKA 'X+Y' in the UK) Where the math prodigy kid is miraculously 'cured' of autism by the power of love?

― Andy the Grasshopper

wow, that sounds terrible. definitely one that i'd want to watch with friends and roast. shit, maybe Evasive will make a video of a bunch of autistic people watching that movie.

I’m not sure how much this qualifies since I read it in high school but “Second Star To The Right” by Deborah Hautzig dealt pretty starkly with anorexia & institutionalization as a result of an eating disorder

(teen-aimed novel inspired by author’s own struggle w anorexia)

Parts of it still stick in my memory even now

god, that has me thinking of the YA novel i read about a fat camp. idk if that would qualify. the whole discourse around EDs all my life has been so fucking awful, particularly both in its denial of the traumatic roots of it and the reinforcement of a lot of the things that lead to EDs in the first place. i got tendencies towards binge eating. does that _count_? i kind of don't feel like i'm allowed, that AMABs don't have eating disorders, we're just fat slobs.

anyway it wasn't a good book. because the book was like oh hey look at how awful this fat camp is - these camps hinging on _conversion experiences_ that kids aren't exactly choosing of their own free will - and then at the end of the book the kid gets home from the fat camp and says "fuck that fat camp" and starts eating healthy and exercising by, like, ???, and reaches a healthy weight.

at least that's how i remember it. i don't remember the name or the author or anything like that. i just remember the character talked about being so fat he (i think the protag was a "he") couldn't see his feet, and then i would just obsessively check to see if i could see my feet over my belly, and (deleted)

I read an old paperback of The Snake Pit in my teenage years... can't remember all that much about it. Looks like there was a 1948 film version with Olivia de Havilland which I've never seen

― Andy the Grasshopper, Thursday, March 13, 2025 9:19 PM

I enjoyed the movie a lot.