Sanitarium!
You’ve all been here in this hell hole of a sanitarium for months now; trapped like rats in a maze, experimented on, mistreated, and downright abused by the staff – who seem to think you are less than human - and worse, have convinced the State and everyone else that you are a danger to yourself and others.
You may have your quirks, but you’re nothing like what the sanitarium has made you out to be. Even so, you can’t leave, unless you want to be hunted down like an animal – or shot by the sadistic guards in trying.
Not that you have anything to go back to – now that your friends and family have abandoned you here. No visits, no letters, no nothing. Perhaps they believe all the lies – that you are mad; that you are a dangerous animal; that you need to be caged and the key thrown away forever.
Your lives up until recently have been pretty wretched; with daily torture sessions carried out on you for the perverse pleaser of Dr. Kaufman and his staff – all thinly veiled in the nomenclature of “medically proven science and therapy.”
“It is necessary to help make you a better person,” the good doctor would always say; as he did all manner of horrible things to you. Things that you knew were not helping at all – but actively working to destroy you. You refused to let yourself be destroyed however, and hung on through it with all the willpower you could muster.
The doctor was not trying to cure you.
He was trying to see how long you could last before you broke. You were not going to give him the satisfaction of breaking so easily.
Even so, the resistance has taken its toll.
For the naturalist Archie Rouse, the daily treatments were spinning in the RTD (Rotational Therapy Device) until he either puked or passed out; and frequent stints being hung upside down on the wall, as part of his Suspension Therapy. Once a week, it was Shock Therapy for good measure – the Doctor taking particular interest in noting the effects of various voltages to the male anatomy.
For Earl Boggs, who believed he had been abducted by aliens, they actually drilled a hole in his cranium for what they called Trepanation Therapy. Then they set him down in ‘The Hole’ for days on end, as part of a Sensory Deprivation Therapy. In The Hole, Earl had heard shrill piping sounds coming through the walls and had vivid hallucinations of male and female sex organs sprouting from the floor and dancing around him to the ‘music’.
For Rupert Meeks, who had seemed totally normal when he first arrived – claiming to have been brought here under false pretenses – it was Sleep Deprivation Therapy and daily Enemas. Kept awake for fourteen days straight, he was then allowed to sleep twenty four hours, and then had to do it all over again. As this went on, Rupert began to slip into delusional states, thinking he was somewhere else (in a cave filled with mummies), and inadvertently developed Pica – eating bugs, dirt, his own hair, and basically anything that he could fit in his mouth to chew and swallow.
For Mildred O’Connell, who claimed to hear voices telling her what to do, it was the same for her as it had been for Earl Boggs – first, Trepanation Therapy, having a hole drilled into her skull, and then time in The Hole for Sensory Deprivation Therapy. During her stay in The Hole, Mildred continued to hear voices – only these weren’t her usual ones. These voices wanted her to dig through the wall to them, so they could sup on the blood that flowed from Mildred’s fingertips. Only Mildred couldn’t dig through the stone and the blood kept flowing – until it had filled The Hole and caused her to drown to death. Obviously, she hadn’t drowned in her own blood, but it had felt entirely real to her when she was down in that accursed pit.
For the Kleptomaniac, Betty Mayfield, the daily treatments were being dunked in ice baths for what the Doctors called Hydrotherapy – which caused Betty a great deal of physical pain and anxiety – as the Guards would not only grope and paw at her naked body, but would actually push and hold her head underwater for periods of time. During one such event, Betty passed out and when she came to, the Doctor was gone, she was laying naked on a gurney, and the guards were busy cinching their belts back up, after what she could only imagine was them gang-raping her.
And for Helen Childs, the Nymphomaniac, no attempt was even made to hide her rape. Her “therapy”, as it were, was a twice daily “Aversion Therapy” in Director Kaufman’s office that was nothing less than full blown BDSM – where the Doctor would literally get his rocks off, while whipping Helen in a zippered leather facemask and telling her what a dirty little whore she was. Between Sessions (as the Doctor recovered), Helen would receive a Daily Enema.
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“It is necessary to help make you a better person,” the good doctor would always say …
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Recently however, things have changed. Director Kaufman seems to have been caught up in some new approach to Psychiatric Treatment, involving the effects of music and sound on the demented.
Everyone who could play an instrument, or learn fast, was given a part to play in an octet of chamber music; while the horrible tortures (aside from Helen's continued daily "Aversion Therapy") were abruptly replaced with music practice and bizarre sessions of “Tone Induction Therapy” – where the subject is exposed to a battery of unusual sounds, tones, and volumes for various intervals.
While this is much preferable to the deplorable treatments before, it is just a matter of time before the good doctor finds some way to twist these new experiments into more physical and mental torment . . .
