I could start with a nod to Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis by writing:

“Rupert Russell awoke one morning from unsettling dreams to find the world had gone mad.”

But that isn’t quite right and doesn’t fully describe the situation that filmmaker Russell found himself when he awoke on the morning of November 9th, 2016, to the news that Donald Trump had been elected the 45th President of the United States of America. Russell described it better himself:

“I felt a sense of unreality. That I had woken up on a different planet than the one I had gone to bed on.”

Seemingly, the world had had gone mad overnight. But how had this happened? And what had caused this strange insanity?

Russell wanted to understand what the fuck had just happened. He also wanted to do something about this new topsy-turvy world, where the lunatics had taken over the asylum. He was finishing work on his documentary feature Freedom for the Wolf. Nick Fraser, the editor of BBC’s Storyville, had come onboard as executive producer. Fraser had also just launched a new venture, Docsville, and asked Russell if he would like to make some short films for this new platform.

On the day after the election, Russell had written a Medium post on being sane in insane places inspired by the work of David Rosenhan, in particular his famous experiment in which he entered an asylum claiming he heard voices. The doctors and nurses had diagnosed Rosenhan as insane, however, the patients quickly realized that Rosenhan was actually faking it.

Russell also “sketched out two more essays on madness under the new regime of (in)sanity”. He sent these along to Fraser as a possible idea for a series of animations called How the World Went Mad which would diagnose Trump’s election as a form of madness and offer up a possible cure. Fraser told Russell to go for it.
 

 
The end result was a series of five short films explaining How the World Went Mad by which Russell asked the very pertinent question:

In a world gone mad who can you trust?

Beginning on that fateful morning in Fall 2016, Russell takes the viewer through a brief history of psychiatry, culture, and politics to explain how we have all ended up here. I contacted Russell to ask him about the making How the World Went Mad and what he hoped his diagnosis of our current malady would achieve.

How did you go about making ‘How the World Went Mad’?

Rupert Russell: I spent a month in the British Library going through histories and psychologies of madness. I picked out studies that could be linked together to form a narrative arc of the series: diagnosis, symptoms, transmission, epidemic, and cure. I turned the notes into scripts, recorded them, and sent the files to Dare Studio in Poland, who had worked on my last feature, who got to work on the animation. The rest is archival footage, which I trawled through.

The most arduous of which was finding out who the infamous “fat guy” that Trump tormented in The Apprentice was. When we locked picture, Alex Williamson composed a wonderfully off-kilter score and three sound designers at Unit Post created a soundscape of insanity filled with screams, explosions, and even orgasms.

The polemic for your films rests on the idea Trump is mad—what happens if he is not mad?

RR: The source of my anxiety, as I describe in Episode 1, “Diagnosis,” is precisely this question: What if Trump is the new definition of sanity and it is I who am in fact mad. The line between sanity and insanity has been a skipping rope throughout history, pulling people in and out of it. Gays, lesbians, and women have only recently escaped their 19th-century diagnosis as perverts and hysterics. The Trump/Pence victory signalled another swing of the rope. In their Handmaid’s Tale morality, these gender traitors deserve no voice in the patriarch’s definition of sanity—where only the male “commanders” are capable of rational judgements.

The insanity of this position should be self-evident. But too increasingly, it’s becoming the new definition of sanity. We are living through another reaction to social progress that has resurrected the same tropes and characters of the feminist backlash in the 1980s, which inspired Atwood’s original novel.

More diagnosis of ‘How the World Went Mad,’ after the jump…
 

Click here to read larger image.
 
We’ve previously posted a rather shocking list of reasons for admission to the West Virginia’s Hospital for the Insane—aka the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum—back in the late-1800s. Well, here’s another list of causes for admission to the Aberdeen Lunatic Asylum in 1847—which contains some strange and troubling reasons for being committed including:

Sedentary Life
Tea drinking (“Abuse of Tea”)
Vegetable Poisoning
Acute Rheumatism
Cancer of Breast
Prolonged Nursing
Childbirth
Religious excitement
Loss of Property
Disappointment in Love
Fright

And if none of these common symptoms fit the bill, there’s the catchall: “Cause not ascertained.”
 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
List of Reasons for Admission to an Insane Asylum from the late 1800s

Via NHS Grampian Archives.

 
After viewing this list of what could have gotten you admitted to West Virginia’s Hospital for the Insane (Weston) aka Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum back in the late-1800s, I’ve swiftly concluded that the criteria was rather all-encompassing. Who among us is a stranger to what’s on this list?

In this century, it looks more like a “wish list” for Dr. Phil’s guest bookers!

Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum is still open, but only for tours.

Sources: Appalachian History, Grateful Web, West Virginia State Archives, West Virgina Encyclopedia, Steampunk

h/t Richard Swanson!

 
Is it wrong to hold up someone who is so obviously mentally ill to mockery and then sell advertisements against it? Am I a bad person for lampooning someone clearly losing his shit for laughs and banner ads?

Nah. This kind of thing happens on Fox News all the live-long day, doesn’t it?

I think if you showed a younger Alex Jones what he would eventually come to represent, and how the general public would regard him, as they do today, “Winning” like his pal Charlie Sheen, just a sad, pathetic clown, he’d probably break down and start sobbing.

Imagine the sheer, unmitigated hell his wife must go through!

Crack is wack, but whatever Alex Jones is on should be avoided at all costs.

Maybe the Illuminati HAVE already gotten to him. I guess I wasn’t thinking, you know, enough steps ahead!
 

H. H. Richardson Complex/Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane, Buffalo, New York

In the U.S. prior to the early 1960s there was a government-run system of mental institutions, some housed in grand Gothic Victorian buildings with impressive grounds. Following changes in psychiatric treatment and the deregulation and privatization of the mental health industry, many of these structures were simply abandoned. For decades they have stood empty, too expensive to demolish. The Kennedy administration planned to act on recommendations from the National Institute of Mental Health to replace these asylums with 2000 outpatient community mental health centers (one for every 100,000 people) by 1980, only a fraction of which were ever built.

Photographers have captured these old asylums in varying states of decay.

 

 
Trenton Psychiatric Hospital, Trenton, New Jersey

According to The Kingston Lounge blog:

Many of the patient rooms in the central wing [at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital] still contain beds and furniture, and in the northern wing, many still contain belongings. This suggests relatively rapid abandonment, and the fact that apparently usable beds, refrigerators, and other furniture and appliances were not removed for use in other buildings or state facilities helps to confirm this.

 
Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, Weston, West Virginia

This West Virginia asylum is now a tourist attraction, hosting ghost tours, historical tours, an asylum ball, and stage production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. According to the official website, “The Asylum has had apparition sightings, unexplainable voices and sounds, and other paranormal activity reported in the past by guests, staff, SyFy’s Ghost Hunters, Ghost Hunters Academy, the Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures and Paranormal Challenge.”

 
Overbrook Asylum/Essex County Hospital Center, Cedar Grove, New Jersey

Weird New Jersey describes Overbrook Asylum:

The hospital was laid out at the bottom of a hill atop which sat the Mountain Sanatorium – a facility used at various times to treat tuberculosis patients, wayward children, and drug abusers. These two facilities, and the many abandoned buildings associated with them, became Essex County’s most legendary location, home to escaped lunatics, troubled ghosts, and roving gangs of ne’er do wells. For a generation of North Jersey teens, a visit to the Overbrook site was a rite of passage – going to “The Asylum,” “The Bin,” or “The Hilltop”, as it was called by various gangs of teens, was a surefire way to test your mettle and impress your friends.

Unlike other abandoned asylums with patients’ personal possessions scattered all over the building, the Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane in New York unwittingly maintained a goldmine for historians. The hospital kept the unclaimed suitcases of all patients who passed away there from the 1910’s to the 1960’s. When the facility closed in 1995 hundreds of intact suitcases were discovered in a locked attic space. These have been preserved by the New York State Museum and added to its permanent collection. Photographer Jon Crispin was permitted to document each suitcase’s contents, resulting in a fascinating but melancholy series of photos of patients’ personal items. You get the feeling most people assumed they would only be staying at the asylum temporarily.

 
Preserved suitcase of a mental patient at the Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane, New York

Crispin said:

Originally, doctors thought that all you had to do was remove people from the stresses and strains of society, give them a couple of years to get their life together, and they’d get better. Eventually people realized they needed facilities where patients could come and never leave. There’s some question as to whether or not the patients themselves packed their suitcases, or if their families did it for them. But the suitcases sent along with them generally contained whatever the incoming patient wanted or thought they might need.

Overbrook Asylum, Cedar Grove, New Jersey, below:

Via io9, Kingston Lounge, and Collectors Weekly.

 
Larry Klayman, Esq., a former Justice Department prosecutor, the founder of Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch and the author of WHORES: Why and How I Came to Fight the Establishment, went off on one of the most hilariously tweaked post-election rants that I’ve yet found. It’s a mini-masterpiece of spittle-flecked reichwing Christian conspiracy theories and just total bughouse, nutjob batshit craziness.

This is mind rot at its absolute finest. Savor it:

Many times in the history of the world, God has destroyed His people and started anew when they strayed from His word. Just ask Noah what the flood was all about! This time, even with the floods of Hurricane Sandy and the re-election of the President Barack Hussein Obama, God has spared us for the moment. Instead God has sent a dire warning and encouraged We the People to rise up, in His name, to restore His kingdom.

Had Mitt Romney been elected president, many among the flock would have been lulled asleep and deluded into thinking that a Moses had appeared to deliver us out of the Egyptian-like bondage we find ourselves in – thanks to our “Mullah in Chief” and his growing voter hoards of socialists, communists, anti-Semites, anti-Christians, atheists, radical gays and lesbians, feminists, illegal immigrants, Muslims, anti-Anglo whites and others who last Tuesday cemented his destructive hold on the White House and our country.

It is now clear that there is no Republican Moses [Ya think?]. Indeed, if Mitt Romney could go back in time, he should have first advocated putting the Grand Ol’ Party into bankruptcy, along with Chrysler and GM. Now, with this latest stunning political defeat, the party has finally had its last hurrah and is dead once and for all. Good riddance! One party down and one more to go. The Democrats, who are even more corrupt than the Republican establishment (and that is hard to fathom, I know), are, despite their election victory, not far behind – that is, if We the People rise up and exercise our God-given rights and fight for our freedom.

The bottom line is this: Americans of faith and those who believe in capitalism and hard work as the means to achieve, not “Atlas Shrugged”-portrayed government handouts, have now seen their country taken over largely by uneducated and lazy morons, goons and thugs who want to dismantle all our Founding Fathers conceived of and fought for. And, their hateful Marxist desire to destroy Western civilization is not limited to the “Great Satan,” the United States, but to its biblical Judeo-Christian roots, embodied in the nation of Israel. With no racial slur intended, but only to employ the same lingo used sarcastically by many of Obama’s supporters to describe their past plight, if we do nothing and simply look to future elections to restore the nation, we will soon become the “new niggers,” relegated to the back of the bus – as the bus speeds away to quickly fall over the fiscal, social and moral cliff. African-Americans were right when they said this years ago, and we’re now right to feel the same way today.

I’m sure you get the point. It goes on (and on and on) from there.

Larry Klayman, you are one crazy motherfucker, that’s all I have to say… because commentary in this case is quite unnecessary!

Read more of “God Has A Bigger Plan,” if you can stand to, at WorldNutDaily.

HT TPM

 
Alex Jones has really topped himself this time. And then a few moments later, he tops himself again. How fantastic that we live in a world where a guy who spouts crazy bullshit like this with a straight-face is seen on a major 24-hour news channel? (Guess which one?)

I love the modern world sometimes, don’t you?

Here, Alex Jones absolutely leaves David Icke in the dust as he spins a conspiracy theory of the how “the elite” smoke DMT to put them in touch with Terence McKenna’s “self-transforming machine elves” who want them to kill everyone Dalek-style. Apparently.

According to Jones, the alien beings have instructed that the Large Hadron Collider be built so that the inter-dimensional vortex could be opened, allowing them to gain access to our space-time continuum.  (Well he doesn’t say that exactly, I’m interpolating just a little bit).

His rant is SO “Doctor Who,” isn’t it? Steven Moffat has got to steal it!

This shit is poetry. It’s hilarious Jabberwocky as well, but poetry nevertheless. So, so good. Savor it.

Jones says that he doesn’t “need” DMT, but speaking as someone who (quite literally) smoked DMT up to four times a day for a two month period in 1994 (I know, I know), I really think he should try some. Immediately if not sooner, if for no other reason to test out his own theory and report back to his listeners, right?

Truly this is one of the best Alex Jones rants yet (and that, as you know, is really saying something). The idea of the Bilderbergers sitting around hitting the DMT pipe and doing the bidding of “the elves” seems to scare Jones, but to me this seems like quite a good thing. But then again,  I suppose that really depends on what side of the aliens you’re on, doesn’t it?

Which side are you on?
 

 
Via Henry Baum/Joseph Matheny