[Music] [Heartbeat thumping][Smith, Kline & French Laboratories] [and The American Medical Association] [Present] [Music][The March of Medicine] [Heartbeat continues] ["We, The Mentally Ill..."] [Tonight, in an unprecedented telecast, mental patients will present the March of Medicine.] [This tangible evidence of progress against mental disease is offered at the close of] [the annual meeting of the psychiatrists of the American Psychiatric Association] [as a tribute to their priceless contribution.] [Narrator:] I am a mental patient at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. For ages, people like us have been hidden in darkness. Families don't like to talk about their members in mental hospitals. People seem to think there is something worse about being mentally ill than being ill with pneumonia. Well, it isn't true. And because it isn't true, tonight, mental patients all over the country are gathering together to strip away that darkness. Now you can see me. And in a moment you will see others like me. You'll learn from us how mental patients used to be treated, the conditions of our hospitals today, and the new hope that we have now to get well again. Let's take the first part: how we used to be treated. I'm standing on a stage. Behind me, my fellow patients at St. Elizabeths are celebrating our centennial. They're performing a play written by ourselves. It's about our founder, Dorothea Lynde Dix, who lived back when Lincoln did and fought for better treatment for people like us. Each person in the play is a mental patient. Each one, and his doctor, and his guardian gave his permission that you might see us do it, that you can better understand the present by understanding the past. Mental patients like us doing a play for the public. A thing like that is astonishing enough today, but it could never have happened a hundred years ago, when Dorothea Lynde Dix, on a Sunday school mission, went to visit a jail outside of Boston. [Singing:] ...to thee. [Miss Dix:] Shall we try the second verse? And this time, everyone sing. [Singing:] Though like the wanderer/ The sun gone down/[Guard humming along] Darkness... [Piercing scream] [Woman 1:] That lunatic girl is spoiling our fun. [Miss Dix:] Are there people back there? Are they able to join us? [Guard:] Don't go back there, miss! Come on out of here! [Sobbing] [Miss Dix:] Oh! Oh, what a horrible sight![Sobbing continues] Why, these people are half-naked. They look starved and so utterly helpless. [Guard:] Don't let their looks fool you none, miss.[Screaming] Why, they don't feel a thing. Here it is just about their feeding time. Might as well do it and get it over with. [Sobbing]Oh. [Growling and panting] Three mouths to feed...[Miss Dix:] Why, you don't even treat them like human beings! [Guard:] Nice piece of moldy bread... [Miss Dix:] And why is it so cold in here? [Guard:] Oh, you don't understand miss. We keep it cold back here in order to preserve the bodies. Why, they are practically corpses anyhow. Aw, come on. Let's get out of here. It's this group of prisoners that needs your attention, not that bunch of lunatics. [Miss Dix:] It's inhuman, and I think something should be done about it. Thank you for your cooperation, ladies. I hope you enjoyed the singing as much as I did. [Woman 2:] Will you come again? [Miss Dix:] Yes, I plan to return in the near future. [Woman 3:] Don't forget the snuff. [Miss Dix:] I'll remember to bring enough for all of you. [Grunting] And as for these people back here, I intend to see that they get food and warmth and proper clothing. [Guard:] Don't tell me your troubles, miss. Take 'em to the Lord. [Miss Dix:] We'll see about that. [Narrator:] Dorothea Lynde Dix never forgot what she saw at that East Cambridge jail that day. She traveled about and learned some more. And when she had seen enough and heard enough, she set out on a personal crusade for reform. Here, in another scene enacted by my fellow mental patients at St. Elizabeths, we find her before the state legislature in Massachusetts. [Miss Dix:] Mr. President. Gentlemen of the legislature of Massachusetts. I have come here today to ask your help for those poor, unfortunate people who are called lunatics and diseased ones. I have visited the jails and the so-called lunatic asylums and have seen these poor miserable souls who, through no fault of their own, have been exposed to the most cruel and heartless treatment at the hands of those who are supposed to be caretakers. I will not be able to create for you here a true picture of the cruelty and horror which surrounds these poor unfortunates. I have seen these creatures beaten, stripped of their clothing, and chained. [Screaming] [Guard:] Shut up![Screaming] [Miss Dix:] I've come to present the strong claim of suffering humanity. I come to place before the legislature of Massachusetts the condition of the miserable, the desolate, the outcast. With my own eyes I have seen human beings put into living quarters not fit for swine. I have smelled the stench of decaying flesh and all manner of filth. [Crying and screaming] I come as the advocate of the helpless, forgotten, insane, and idiotic men and women. Of beings sunk to a condition from which even the most unconcerned would start with real horror. Of beings wretched in prisons and more wretched in our almshouses. I have even witnessed these poor creatures being denied the common humanity of food and water. [Caretaker 1:] You want some water in your face? Here's your water in your face! [Sobbing] [Miss Dix:] And I cannot suppose it needful to employ earnest persuasion or stubborn argument in order to arrest or bring upon a subject all the more strongly pressing because it is revolting and disgusting in its details. I have uncovered cruelty and gross lack of understanding on the part of those who are supposed to be caretakers. [Moaning][Caretaker 2:] Can't you never learn to talk, dummy? Ha ha. [Moaning] [Miss Dix:] If my pictures are displeasing, coarse, or severe, my subjects, it must be recollected, offer no tranquil, refined, or composing features. These unfortunate beings were put on exhibition and shown to the public as if they were freaks. [Interposing voices] [Caretaker 3:] Quiet down in there. Quiet down, I tell you. Quiet... Come on! [Crying and moaning]Aw, come on! [Miss Dix:] The condition of human beings reduced to extremist states of degradation and misery cannot be exhibited in softened language, or adorn a polished page. [Man 1:] False accusations![Man 2:] Lies, lies! [Man 3:] She's a lunatic herself! [Man 4:] She should not be allowed to stand here and tell us these fantastic tales. [Gavel beating][Judge:] Order! Order! Gentleman, please, order. [Narrator:] Dorothea's one-woman fight to help us, the mentally ill, never gave her a moment's rest. Even when she caught a few winks of sleep, worn and weary from her struggles, she saw our need in her dreams. [Scary music] [Ominous female vocals] [Music continues] [Ominous female vocals] Our play takes two hours to tell the full story of what Dorothea Lynde Dix did for us. We'll come back to it later. But now that you have seen conditions as they were in her day, let's go to another mental hospital and hear from patients themselves about the conditions common today, even at such a progressive place as the New Jersey State Hospital in Trenton, the first she ever founded. [Female patient 1:] This is my hospital. Looks very pretty from the outside, doesn't it? Plenty of room for the birds and the squirrels. But come on in and take a look inside. I have been a patient here in this building for two years. I want you to come inside and see what I see every day. This is East-12, in the main building. It was so pretty from the outside. Look at it for yourself. There are a hundred and eighteen patients in this one ward alone, a ward intended for only sixty. Some are more disturbed than others, and we're all in each other's ways. There are patients here that have been living in this ward for over twenty years. It's crowded and smelly. But some don't remember any other home. Now you see what I mean? You don't hear the noises that we hear all day; it rings in your ears all day. And we only have one nurse here, and we hardly ever see her. If you don't believe me, ask Miss Perry. [Miss Perry:] She is absolutely right. I am the only registered nurse on this floor with a hundred and eighteen patients. The A-wing and the B-wing: altogether it amounts to about a hundred and fifty patients. With two student nurses and maybe three attendants, we have all we can do to bathe the patients, get them to cafeteria, take them to the doctors, give them their medications, and try to keep the place clean. We have no time to read up on their charts and find out about their diagnosis to try to help them. We figured it out the other day that each single person is entitled to one and a half minutes of employees' time. Which means they have a total of four and a half minutes per day. This sounds bad, but you should see some of the other buildings here. [Male patient:] You come to where we live through barred doors. It's what we call the Broome building for the criminally insane. This here has been my home for fifteen months, dormitory one. Look how those beds are crowded together. No chairs to sit on, no place to put your clothes, hardly no ventilation. Not healthy at all. It's hard to get to sleep with the jibber-jabber from thirty-two guys, more than sixty, counting both rooms. Some's mighty disturbed. Once a man broke a window and tried to kill himself with a piece of glass. I'm scared sometimes I'm going to get hurt. We spend fourteen to fifteen hours a day in here. Mr. Emens, the building supervisor, can tell you how we feel about that. [Mr. Emens:] Some patients don't want any part of a ward. They'll purposely stir up trouble so we'll take them out of here and send them to a cell. [Male patient:] The day room downstairs is no better. Crowded, people spit on the floor, smells bad, we have to wait to go to the dining room in shifts. No wonder we had a big riot here the 29th of November. [Female patient 2:] Broome building may be bad. I don't know, I haven't been in there. But look where we chronic patients live, four miles out from the hospital. This was temporary housing for the Navy in 1942. They had an airport right near here. They moved us out here because we were so crowded down at the hospital. They call it the colony. They spent a fortune on this place to try to make it over. But look at it. For eight years, we have been living in this shambles. Go inside if you want to see what it's like. Rickety stairs, old navy double-decker beds, people crowded together, plumbing bad and always getting out of order. And some patients have no place at all to put their clothes. As for a doctor, we hardly get the time we'd like to talk to a doctor. [Dr. Bennett:] That's true. I'm Dr. Bennett, and I'm the psychiatrist out here. I'm one psychiatrist for over six hundred patients. What can you expect? We're presently in the process of moving these people out of here. Some of them are going down to the new hospital at Ancora, where we hope they'll get the type of help they need. But Dr. McGee, our superintendent, can tell you more about that. [Dr. McGee:] Yes, we're closing down at the colony as fast as we can. We've already built a new building here, and we are planning the reconstruction of another. But all these moves will far from solve our problems, problems common to state hospitals throughout the country. The basic problem, strange as it may seem, is public apathy, the very same that one hundred years ago confronted our founder Dorothea Dix. [Narrator:] And so you've heard from mental patients themselves and those who are trying to help them of the crowded conditions and the shortage of staff in mental hospitals. But suddenly now, there is new hope for all, for you the public, who pay the bills, and for us, the mentally sick. This real chance for many of us to get well again is due to research in mental illness. And one of the most hopeful contributions of that research is new drugs. Hear this story, too, from the lips of mental patients. [Doctor 1:] Do you speak English, Sally?[Sally:] Yes. [INAUDIBLE] No. [Doctor 1:] Sally, do you speak English? [Sally:] This is me when I came to the hospital. I was very upset from many worries. They make me sick. I could not even talk to the doctor. [Doctor 1:] It says over here you heard voices... [Sally:] That's a speech thing...[Doctor 1:] Is that true? [Sally:] Yes.[Doctor 1:] Hmm? What did the voices say to you? [Sally:] They tried to tell me. [Doctor 1:] What did the voices say to you? What did the voices say to you, Sally? [Sally:] Mm-mm. [Non-English speaking] Only you see, God... [Doctor 1:] Is God speaking to you now?[Sally:] [Non-English speaking] What is God saying to you now, Sally? What is God saying...[Sally:] Don't be stupid, girl. Be nice girl. Be nice lady. Don't play too much... stupid [INAUDIBLE]. That's for you, baby. That's you. That's too much for me. [No, no. I don't want it. You can have it. She's stupid for me. Hold [INAUDIBLE] [Non-English speaking] This is me four days later after the doctor gave me some medicine to help me. Now I'm not so mixed up. I talk to him okay. [Doctor 1:] And you were telling me there was something wrong with the neighborhood, is that right?[Sally:] Mm-hmm. What was wrong with the neighborhood? [Sally:] [Non-English speaking][Doctor 1:] Well, you said you wanted to jump out the window. Is that true? [Sally:] Not me. [Doctor 1:] You tried to jump out the window, is that right?[Sally:] No. My children, they are with [INAUDIBLE] I live on the seventh floor.[Doctor:] Mm-hmm. [Sally:] And sometimes when... when I see a kid doing something to... a big chil... big kid try to hit my children, I wish I could jump out the window and kill them. [Doctor 1:] Hmm, I see. [Sally:] 'Cause nobody likes their children to be beaten up for bigger children, 'cause my children are small. I mean six years old. That's not too big. [Doctor 1:] And did you feel at home that people were doing something purposely to you or to your children? [Sally:] No, only to my children. [Doctor 1:] Only to your children. Do you think that they picked them out purposely to do these bad things?[Sally:] Mm-hmm. This is me when I'm ready to leave the hospital. I am better now. [Dr. Denber:] Well, how would you compare your condition, uh, today, let's say, uh, to the way it was when you first came here? Do you remember how you were when you first came here?[Sally:] Yeah, I remember. [Dr. Denber:] What's the difference? [Sally:] Well, I was... I... I know it was something in my nerves maybe, 'cause I tried to help it, but I can't help it. [Dr. Denber:] What did you feel then that you don't feel now? [Sally:] I feel like, uh, I talk just to myself. I don't feel like talking to nobody else, just to myself. [Dr. Denber:] And what are you going to do when you leave the hospital? [Sally:] Well, every time I came sick, I gave my nurse right down, I said, I'm not gonna work too hard when I get out, but then I got to work hard. [Dr. Denber:] You have to work hard when you go out. And, uh, what do you plan to do when you leave the hospital? What are you going to do when you go home? [Sally:] Well, uh, I think now when I go home maybe I don't have all the children with me for a while. [Dr. Denber:] I see. And? [Sally:] So I think then... I don't know. Take a good long rest when I get home, read a lot of books. Those what I like to read. I said goodbye to my doctor, and I go to see my children again and my husband. I am very happy to go home. [Dr. Denber:] Sally is going home today, the result of treatment with new drugs and psychiatry. Drugs that were not even available as much as two years ago. Their names are chlorpromazine and rauwolfia. These new medicines have effected a tremendous change in all of psychiatric treatment. As a result of their use, patients who were hitherto unmanageable, or untreatable, or who had resisted all other forms of treatment, now have been helped. With the use of these drugs, we have made tremendous inroads with patients who have inhabited our hospitals all over the country for many, many years. These drugs have given American medicine, with your help and support, the greatest opportunity of this age to reduce the huge burden of mental illness that falls upon us all. [Dr. Overholser:] Here at St. Elizabeths Hospital, there are patients that number literally in the thousands. We are witnessing dramatic progress in the search for a more effective treatment of mental illness. Over the years, thanks to persistent pioneering of many people, many new techniques have been added. Now, with the advent of these new tranquilizing drugs, it seems not too much to say that we are on the verge of an entirely new era in the treatment of mental illness. Since we've been using these drugs at St. Elizabeths Hospital, we have virtually discontinued electric shock treatment. That is perhaps one measure of the effectiveness of these drugs. Two out of three of the patients who come to St. Elizabeths Hospital, thanks to the numerous tools which we now have at our command, is able to return home. That in itself is the most convincing proof I can offer for the statement that the problem of mental disorder, vast though it is, is not an insurmountable one. I believe that the opportunity to close in on this huge problem is within sight. We have but to grasp it. [Narrator:] Yes, medicine is closing in on mental illness. And what better evidence of this than mental patients joining tonight with our hospital staffs to tell you the history of our past and the hope of our present. But what about the future, from your point of view as well as our own? Let's go back to New Jersey, to a man who counts among his responsibilities the hospital founded by Dorothea Lynde Dix that you visited at Trenton. We asked him to join with us tonight because he has thought long about our problem and yours. [Gov. Minor:] I am Robert B. Minor, governor of New Jersey. You have seen the problem state hospitals face. Well, behind me is a costly new mental hospital open here at Ancora to help relieve the burden. Yet, in a matter of months, this new hospital will be filled to capacity. Indeed, at the current rate of increase in mental illness, requiring five hundred new beds a year, New Jersey may soon need a fifth mental hospital, then a sixth, then a seventh, ad infinitum. The chances are the same situation prevails in your own state. The problem we all face together is, are we eternally going on to vote millions upon millions merely to house our poor unfortunates, or should we attack this Frankenstein monster before it devours us? I think that we should attack. Attack with a constructive human and spiritual approach to mental illness so that many people now in confinement may be restored to their homes and their families and their gainful occupations, and that... so that many people now threatened with mental illness may be given early treatment to forestall months and years of confinement. We can do it by voting more money for research in mental illness, research which has many rays of hope. We can do it by creating a proper atmosphere conducive to recovery in our hospitals, giving them more doctors, more nurses, more attendants, and the benefits of promising new therapies. And we can do it, each and every one of us, by giving our full cooperation to organizations like the National Association for Mental Health. A century and a half ago, the mentally ill were set free from their chains. In the last half-century there has been a steady improvement in care and a steady search for new answers. With your support, there is every evidence that the next decade will produce more victories in the war against mental disease than have ever been won before. [Singing:] Oh, working on the building/ Working on the building, Lord/ Working on the building/ Tryin' hard to make my home/Oh... [Narrator:] And so we return to our play with workmen singing at the groundbreaking for what is to become our hospital, St. Elizabeths, the culmination of Dorothea Dix's struggle. As we the mentally ill bring you to this, our final scene, we are content to leave our last words to one of those who spoke the first. [Singing:] ...I would not have this race to run/ Trying hard to make my home/Oh... [Miss Dix:] I came to present the strong claim of suffering humanity. I placed before you the condition of the miserable, the desolate, the outcast. I came as the advocate of the helpless, forgotten, insane, and idiotic men and women. The condition of human beings reduced to extremist states of degradation and misery could not have been exhibited in softened language or adorned a polished page. I commit to you the sacred cause. [Singing:] ...my home [Heartbeat thumping][The March of Medicine] [Presented by Smith, Kline and French Laboratories] [In cooperation with The American Medical Association] [Produced by Medical Television UnitSmith, Kline and French Laboratories] [Script: Lou Hazam] [Film Editor: Gerald Polikoff] [Dorothea Dix Play created and acted by St. Elizabeths Patients] [NBC Producer: Doris Ann] [The March of Medicine]