The Problem with Haunted Asylums Places

The majority of movies don’t have advisors. Instead, they depend on their assumptions, which are typically based on stereotypes and cliches. At times moviemakers do investigation, but so many of the facts out there are outdated or distorted that it’s difficult for them to find out without the psych background what to believe. They think their assumptions are precise for the reason that they have no experience with the modern psychological health field.


"Haunted" places are trendy Halloween attractions, but cyclic haunted asylums in particular draw fire from psychological fitness advocacy groups like the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). NAMI argues that such attractions "contribute to the stigma by heartening false stereotypes and barricading the trail toward an educated society" and asks the web sites to remove the displays.


One spot on NAMI’s 2010 list is the Sandusky, Ohio, amusement park Cedar Point, which advertises "Dr. D. Mented’s Asylum for the Criminally Insane" this way: "Torture. The twisted and evil Dr. D. Mented has practiced inhumane experiments for many years."


Upon receiving a letter from NAMI, Cedar Point officials stated that haunted houses "are not designed to depict reality" and therefore do not promote false stereotypes, e.g. "that people with mental illness are dangerous and deranged and that the general public should be frightened of such people." Many online commenters believe that NAMI is taking itself too seriously, and should spend its time and money doing more concrete things to help the people who need it.


Let’s look at both sides.


On the one hand, asking a highly popular, entertainment-oriented, money-making attraction that’s already in full swing to tear it all down in hopes that people will realize that the depictions were unrealistic may be overly optimistic, at least for this year.

On the other hand, haunted asylums do play up scary stereotypes: that the clinical staff uses patients for ugly experiments; and that people who need to be hospitalized are radically different from everyone else, completely out of control, and savagely dangerous.


Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad if the stigma against mental illness weren’t already so high. I haven’t met anyone who’d hesitate to say they needed to go to the hospital for a broken leg, for example, but if a student remarks in an Abnormal Psychology class that she’s been hospitalized for psychological reasons, the entire room tends to recoil.


How does this affect you, the writer?


Well, you may think it would be a great idea to grab a flamboyant stereotype like "Dr. D. Mented." But if you just say "my character, Dr. D. Mented, tormented his patients with electroshock therapy," you’re probably going to end up with a boring story, because we’ve all seen many variations of it before. (Just off the top of my head: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, the movie The House on Haunted Hill, and the television show Supernatural’s episode "Asylum.")


You may think I’m being ironic when I tell you besides helping to reduce stigma, the biggest argument against clichés is that they’re boring (especially the ones that are more than 50 years outdated, like the average "electroshock" portrayal). After all, Cedar Point is making plenty of money with their version of the cliché. But is it really the asylum that draws you in, or what supposedly happened in the asylum? It’s what supposedly happened, of course.


That’s what makes a good story detailing what happened to your characters, how they reacted, what they did in response, how it changed them. Maybe the line that intrigues you most from the St. Lucifer’s description is people chewing their tongues off (What would compel someone to do such a thing?! Figure it out and you have a story), or how people lost their facial features (Are their faces completely smooth? How would such a thing happen? Figure it out and you have a story), but what really draws me in is the "5 miles of underground tunnels."


Perform a little delving into what most machinations you about any given stereotype, put it together with six miles of underground tunnels commanded by a well-drawn villain (or whatever setting grabs your fancy), and you may just have something a lot better than a worn and ragged stereotype that’s only appealing for some pop scares at Halloween.


I believe that cliches wouldn’t work well in writing, but the sad fact is that they’re cliches for a reason: when the average person thinks about a psychological institution, those terrifying images are the first thing that come to mind. Perhaps NAMI thinks it’s going to close any of those haunted asylums which are already open, but bringing increased consciousness to the issue makes people take into consideration and questions their cliched beliefs.


Copyright by Lucy who likes shopping online, going fishing, often searches nike air max ltd and michael jordan sneakers on the Internet.