For the first non-American Horror Story blog, I wanted to start right away with something great, something that helped redefine the way mental health is viewed in pop culture. Instead, I watched the first episode of Do No Harm. The show gave me a good gauge on where pop culture is in regards to Dissociative Identity Disorder, which you might know as Multiple Personality Disorder, and it’s not good.
American Horror Story’s second season ended last week, but I had some final thoughts about the show and one topic that I never got a chance to discuss before the blog moves on.
When I started thinking about this blog and using American Horror Story in particular, I thought the show was going to focus more on the well-documented abuses of the mental health system, and I wanted this column to address those issues directly. I assumed that we would see more of topics like Lana’s expos é or lobotomies and studies like Milgram’s obedience study or the Stanford Prison Study (which is the topic of two horror movies in its own right). Despite the fact that the history of psychology is no more tawdry or evil than any other medical field, the ugly side is certainly more well-known than the positive side and I really thought that was what the show would be about.
This week’s American Horror Story brings us to the end of the season (I’m sorry I missed last week’s blog. I had the flu). It also brought us one tiny glimpse of what I thought the show would be more about, the state of disrepair of the mental hospitals during the 1960s. The show we got was nothing like that, but I wanted to talk about that idea for a bit.
I’m not going to talk about sexual fetishes, necrophilia and adults drinking breast milk, which all happened in this episode of American Horror Story. Fetishes are thought-provoking in how the conscious and unconscious impulses in the brain intersect, but they are complicated and not really safe for work. Instead, let’s discuss a topic that’s nearer to my X-Files loving heart, alien abductions. One of the recurring themes (topics? Plot lines?) of this season has been Kit and Alma’s abduction by aliens in the opening of the first episode.
What a way to come back! American Horror Story came back from its hiatus by hitting the ground running, giving us updates on Lana and the new Briarcliff Psychiatrist, Dr. “Bloody Face” Thredson, Kit, Grace and their new baby. We also saw the departure of Sister Mary Eunice (and presumably the devil inside of her). Most importantly, we got a musical number. Following a session of electroconvulsive therapy, Judy Martin (AKA Sister Jude) had a hallucination of herself and the rest of the patients singing “The Name Game.” It might have been the weirdest thing this show has ever done, and it’s a good excuse to talk about hallucinations.
Coping with plenty of leisure activities and sense of purpose in life
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