LOS ANGELES LETTER:"PSYCHIATRY: AN Industry of Death" is the name of a museum on Sunset Boulevard. For several hours you can roam a dungeon-style premises that delivers a clear and sustained message: psychiatry sucks, writes JOHN FLEMING
As the LA palm trees outside overstretch themselves into the blue sky and six lanes of flash cars and pick-up trucks roar past, you are sealed into a theatrical world of condemnation.
In a stage set of straitjackets, restraining tables and human cattle-prods, a versioned world of psychiatry’s lobotomies, ECT and involuntary commitments is vividly dramatised.
Fourteen of Hollywood’s most secret short films and hundreds of dark exhibits sketch a shameful history of the profession, blaming it for racism, the Holocaust, botched psychosurgery and a world dependent on the pharmaceutical industry.
The gist? Psychiatry ain’t no good. We learn it has served as justification for slavery, with its diagnosis of “drapetomania” (the desire of a slave to escape). The profession’s recommended solution was “whipping the evil” out of such runaways.
The displays reference Guantánamo Bay and attribute what goes on there as “torture sold as therapy”. Much is made of brainwashing, and the use of LSD and other drugs to create unwitting assassins.
We are told of the manufacturing of terror by psychiatrists working for the CIA. Here’s how you do it. Step one: split your subject’s personality; step two: erase their memories; step three: replace these memories with false ones.
In 1953, Operation Artichoke melded into Project Mkutray, we learn – this psychiatric exercise concentrated on the manipulation of minds via deep sleep and the playing of continuous recordings for 16 hours a day, perhaps followed by a spot of ECT. One CIA biochemist allegedly leapt from a skyscraper when LSD was slipped into his drink.
Psychiatrists, it is revealed, created suicide bombers (“assassins manufactured by drugs and psycho-political methods“) to conduct the Oklahoma bombing and the 9/11 and Madrid atrocities. Punch drunk with powerful messages, you almost believe it all.
As in most of urban America, the shrink occupies a venerated position in local LA culture. The profession has spawned a thousand jokes (“Hey instead of just chatting like friends, I have a better idea. Why don’t you lie down there on my couch and give me 500 bucks while I listen to your woes?”).
Hollywood’s films frequently feature a trip to the psychiatrist – such so-called “industrialists of death” serve well as confessional devices by which to propel the plot and expose a character’s deepest fears and thoughts.
From Psycho's closing analysis that "explains" Norman Bates, to the shrink who serves to shed light on Tony Soprano's soft side, LA's world of film-driven wealth would appear to rely on psychiatrists for some shards of self-knowledge.
Tinseltown’s streets are dotted with acting, make-up and screenwriting academies: eavesdrop for a moment in the 30-degree sun and you can hear a 22-year-old tripod-leg-shaped struggling actor walk past Hollywood High School, psycho-babbling in the cruder terms of the shrink’s trade. He talks of screen ego and passive/aggressive behaviour patterns, of the subconscious motivation of his character.
A world audience applauds Hollywood’s output as it disseminates its cartoon capture of the human mind and heart. The message? We are all in therapy.
Down the street, a red-bearded dropout with the leg of his trousers torn lengthways holds out a begging bowl outside a clinic that does dentistry for dogs. A slumbering black man stirs at the foot of the steps of the International Cinematographers Guild: he’s on the first rung.
The streets seem full of crazies: a passing bum suddenly thanks me “for all the petrol” as I sit outside a Mexican joint and struggle with a gigantic burritos dos manos. When I slice off half and offer it to him, he runs away.
Back in the Industry of Death museum, I have absorbed the last film and noted how psychiatry has destroyed many a Hollywood talent by turning them into narcotic addicts. I push open a thick door and emerge from the dim light.
“Would you like to make a donation, sir?” ask the two men in the foyer. To buy time, I request change in dollar bills.
And then under watchful eyes, I push a greenback into the collection box for the Scientologists who fund the museum. And then a second. The term for what I now feel? Cognitive dissonance.