Most people think the conditions at the Shutter Island Institution for the Criminally Insane are barbaric.
Actually, they’re quite civilized compared to modern treatment facilities.
Reduce the area of Shutter Island by a factor of 100, relocate it to a concrete wasteland, increase the patient population by a factor of 10, and reduce the doctor to patient ratio to 1:500, and you have a modern psych ward for the criminally insane.
The film takes place at the pinnacle of modern psychiatry, in some respects. The medical profession sought therapeutic solutions to mental illness back then. Doctors had empathy and noble motives.
These days they have pharmaceutical drugs and patient test reports to pass along to the drug companies on the efficacy of their medications. Any more, asylums are institutionalized drug testing facilities. Why use dogs and cats and mice when you can use the criminally insane?
No one will notice. No one cares. No one even knows.
The death of six million Jews during the Holocaust, depicted via powerful flashbacks several times in the film, is nothing compared to what we do with psychoactive drugs to tens of millions of people in the modern day.
They’re all brain dead. They’re worse off than the Holocaust victims. They’re still alive, and condemned to a living hell. Why? Because psychoactive drugs are by far the most profitable medications made by the big drug companies, by FAR.
We may not lobotomize patients any more, but psychoactive drugs are the next best thing. Psychology isn’t about unraveling the secrets of the mind any more. It’s about statistics. Shrinks don’t know a damn thing about the workings of the mind.
They only know how to shut the mind down, utterly, completely, forevermore. They’re superb at that. Dr. Kervorkian, eat your heart out.
Our dependence on drugs and statistics is an abject failure. Narcissism is endemic and getting more so. Movies, the media, fashion trends, and even educational practices exacerbate our narcissism at every opportunity.
Recent studies show that our addiction to the “crack information” on Tweeter, on Facebook, in texting, in email and on PDAs — with no down time ever… it’s degrading our brains. It causes the loss of gray matter, the stuff we need to think.
We might as well kill all our kids and save them a life of misery. Supervised boredom in childhood is the best possible way to stimulate creativity — which, in turn, boosts learning capacity across the board.
Kids are NEVER bored any more. There are DVD players in cars, on the smart phones, on their laptops on vacations. It’s worse than using TV as a babysitter night and day and night, much worse.
High tech gadgets are the virtual psychoactive drugs that are lobotomizing our entire world. Inner cities are themselves institutions for the criminally insane. Whole nations, in some parts of the world, are the same way.
Planet Earth has become a Shutter Island adrift in the cosmos.
