“Misery Rules in Shadowland” is a newspaper article that Mike Gorman, a reporter for the Daily Oklahoman, wrote back in 1946. Having received numerous, deeply disturbing complaints about the poor state and shameful practices of Oklahoma’s state mental hospitals, Gorman took the time to make an extensive two-week-long fact-finding tour of all of Oklahoma’s state mental hospitals. The article that he ended up writing, “Misery Rules in Shadowland,” would quickly go on to become one of the most influential pieces of writing to ever be shared regarding the cruel, calamitous, and inhumane operation of state mental hospitals in general back in the 1940s. Indeed, an expanded version of the article, retitled “Oklahoma Attacks Its Snake Pits,” was featured in the nationally distributed Readers Digest publication in 1948 and thus shared throughout the entire country. The reporter Mike Gorman himself would go on to be one of our nation's greatest, most effective mental illness and mental health care crusaders throughout the entirety of the 1900s.
And this 1946 newspaper article is still relevant today for two reasons. One, it provides a very in-depth, very honest, and very rarely seen first-hand account of our nation's “mental health care system” during this sad period of our nation’s history. And two, this newspaper article is directly responsible for setting into motion a subsequent chain of events that would ultimately end up culminating in our nation’s very first community-based outpatient mental health care center. Opened in Oklahoma in the late 1960s, this first center would go on to serve as the initial blueprint for all of the community-based outpatient mental health care centers that today dot the map throughout much of our country.
Негізгі бет Misery Rules in Shadowland: Part 1 (1946/Narrated)
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