Meghan's Blog

Also SHOCKED...

Melissa Whiteman shared with us today her presentation on A Streetcar Named Desire..and what she found was definitely disturbing...

First of all, i invite you to read Melissa's entry. Ok, are you as appalled as I am now? heh. I never even took the time to think about what would happen to Blanche when she got shipped off to a mental institution. I just thought "Oh, ok, so maybe she will be better off there, there will be people who will actually have time to take care of her and give her the attention she wants/needs." Boy was I wrong. I failed to think about what the world was like back in the 40s. I was thinking about how she might have been treated TODAY...not turned into a vegetable. I think she was just a depressed person whose illness may have escalated a little bit to a mental illness, but I think if she would have just gotten some kind of counseling, she could have gotten much better. I find it almost appalling that they treated these people like lab rats, and literally took an ice pick to their brains to calm the 'misfits' of society. This just shows to me how far we have come in terms of medicine. This almost barbaric surgery (that was performed by someone who never even really did a surgery before!) seems, to me, to just be trying to rid the world of all of the problems by slowly killing off the people. You can't just do that. that's the easy out. and it's just messed up. I'm glad i didn't live in that era. Of course, I probably wouldn't think too much of it if i did...Kind of sad.