User Reviews

I think this is the first one of these shorts I've seen that's considered an 'Underground Film'. It was listed as such in the picture's opening frames, so I'm wondering if it was part of some kind of series, as opposed to a more generic use of the term. One might have considered the topic an underground subject almost sixty years ago, but watching today, it seemed like a fairly even handed depiction of patients in a mental hospital. The picture was produced by the Oklahoma State Department of Health, and the size and scope of the treatment facility depicted was fairly impressive, considering how far we've come since then.

The story focuses in on a single patient, his name sounding something like Fred Clanton (I see no credits posted for this film short). As the story opens, we get Fred's voice over narration exhibiting his paranoia upon entering treatment, but thereafter another narrator takes over to describe what every new patient goes through. All are initially bathed upon entering, with blood and spinal fluid samples taken, followed by diagnosis and staff assignments for the patients. Treatment is prescribed based on the severity of cases in an environment that's meant to be therapeutic and non-stressful. As patients improve, they're moved to other parts of the facility, marking progress as they interact and work with other patients of similar circumstance. Depending on the progress of their treatment and effectiveness of prescribed medications, patients eventually release to the outside world where they can now relate rationally to their spouses, families and friends.

Overall, the picture took a positive approach in it's portrayal of mental illness. With it's title of the same name, one's initial reaction might be to expect something of an exploitative nature like a lot of those 'educational' films of the era. But this one appeared genuinely informative, and an unexpected insight into how far treatment for mental illness had advanced six decades ago.

. . . in the "Land Rush State," they're immediately locked up in huge asylums, MENTAL HOSPITAL reveals. (Yes, the "N-o-w-h-e-r-e" spelled backwards of the famous novel EREHWON is alive and well, hovering above Texas like a buzzard.) Diabetics are held in such burgeoning facilities for at least six months at a time, enduring "insulin shock therapy"--and these are NOT southern insurgents, but 5th and 6th generation Americans of solid European stock! Parents without enough money to appease their kids also are trucked into these holding centers, doomed to be incarcerated there for the rest of their lives, MENTAL HOSPITAL discloses. The three thousand or more U.S. Citizens confined to each of these pens are required to perform unpaid slave labor, dripping with sweat amid institutional kitchens, laundries, and agricultural fields--or they are tortured with "treatments" such as strait jackets, mind-control pills, and electro-shock. (Don't even get me started on the lobotomy departments!) When "F. Clanton," the Sooner guinea pig featured here, finds himself coerced into smoking his first cigarette--stuffed into his mouth and lit up by his alleged "doctor" (18:15)--perceptive viewers will realize--with blood-curdling horror--that the titular MENTAL HOSPITAL is ACTUALLY a Human Testing Lab for the Big Tobacco Boys! All across America, this MENTAL HOSPITAL expose sparked shocked outrage which saw most such horror shows swiftly closed down, razed, bull-dozed, or imploded during the intervening years. Nowadays, they persist mainly where armadillos go to curl up and die.