Horror Movies: What Is Insanity?

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What is insanity? What comes to mind when you hear the word insanity? Mental institutes? Horror movies? Most people define insanity as being “crazy” which is an overused word in today's modern day society. When people don’t understand the definition of insanity it can result in mentally ill people being stigmatized, since a lot of people disregard mental illness and make assumptions about them based on them appearing “normal”. A lot of mentally ill people don’t show physical symptoms. Another misconception that can come about from people not understanding insanity is them assuming that insane people are at fault when they do something wrong such as commit a crime. Mental or not, insanity comes without cause. Insanity according to the dictionary …show more content…
Psychiatric hospitals have changed a lot from back then to how they are now. They used to be referred to as “insane asylums” instead of “psychiatric hospitals” and the patients used to be treated terribly. The doctors would use techniques such as skull drills, electroshock therapy, insulin-induced comas, and other cruel unspeakable treatments (Foerschner, 2010). Patients used to be abused, chained to their beds, and kept in filthy living environments. Nowadays, psychiatric hospitals are caring towards their patients and are more medically based instead of keeping them locked up and mistreating them. Placing the patients in mental facilities made it easy for the public to ignore the problems, but nowadays that is not the case. Psychiatric hospitals nowadays are more like care facilities instead of a jail. Even though mental illness is not as misunderstood and stigmatized as it was back then, it still has a long way to …show more content…
Why the majority of people who are suppose to be sane. Are truly insane.” (Insanity poems...2014). This really sheds light on how society often overuses the word “insane” in inappropriate contexts which waters down the term. Truly insane people aren’t aware of their insanity and symptoms until it’s recognized and diagnosed by someone else. While mental illness is better understood nowadays, society still tries to ignore mental illness as much as they can. People are as uncomfortable talking about insanity as they are talking about sexually transmitted diseases. People often times don’t realize what insanity means and use the term very loosely, not taking into consideration that the illness actually affects many people's lives in a negative