Titicut Follies: An Asylum for the Criminally Insane

"They was gonna take my balls out of me... I told the doctor before I come here that I didn't want my balls taken out of me, so they took the cords out instead."

Titicut Follies, a 1967 documentary film by Frederick Weismann, depicts the miserable and inhumane existence of inmates living in Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

 It's not easy to watch. It hasn't always been easy to find a copy of the movie to watch, either.

Shortly before screening at the 1967 New York Film Festival, Massachusetts sought a legal injunction banning the release of the documentary. These actions come at a time when there was significant negative press about the institution and the state's handling of people with mental illness.

Despite the filmmaker getting permission from all the people shown in the film as well as the superintendent of the facility (who appears to have used the documentary as a tool to try to get more funding), Massachusetts claimed that the permission was not valid. In the end, the film was screened at the New York Film Festival. However, a year later Massachusetts Superior Court judge Harry Klaus ordered the filmed removed from distribution because of claims that the film violated the patients' privacy and dignity.

Wiseman appealed the superior court decision to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The court allowed for a limited distribution of the film allowing it to be shown only to doctors, lawyers, judges, health-care professionals, social workers, and students in these and similar fields. Further appeals to the US Supreme Court were refused.

For years hardly anyone saw this film. For years, the men at Bridgewater languished, often naked and in solitary confinement. This institution was one of the myriad examples of  people with mental illness being treated like unwanted animals.

Who were the men at this institution? How about the man who painted a horse? One inmate was sent to Bridgewater in 1938 because he painted a horse with stripes to make it look like a zebra. He was a fresh fruit vendor and in order to increase sales and get more attention, he though it might be a good idea paint his horse. He was arrested for public drunkenness at age 29 and died at Bridgewater from old age. He was supposed to serve two years.



News reports at the time suggest that upward of 30 inmates were being held illegally. Many of those prisoners were in Bridgewater because they lacked the skills or financial resources to navigate through the legal system. In one remarkably horrible example, a man named Charles was sentenced to Bridgewater for breaking and entering in 1910. Despite the maximum penalty for this felony being two years, he remained in the prison until at least 1967.

With the ban on distribution and viewing of Titicut Follies, this became the first film in this history of the United States film industry to be banned from general audiences for reasons other than immorality, obscenity, or national security.

In 1987 families of seven inmates who died at the hospital sought legal redress from the hospital and state. As Ronald Reagan was in his final years of his presidency overseeing the end of a very long process in which lead to people with mental illness continuing to suffer in institutions while allegedly shifting treatment into the community (see here, here, and here) one plaintiff was

"restrained for two and a half months and given six psychiatric drugs at vastly unsafe levels--chocked to death because he could not swallow his food... There is a direct connection between the decision not to show that film publicly and my client dying 20 years later, and a whole host of other people dying in between... In the years since Mr. Wiesman made 'Titicut Follies' most of the nations big mental institutions have been closed or cut back by court orders... The film may have also influenced the closing of the institution featured in the film."

In the late 1980s ten legally incompetent and seven competent inmates depicted in the film were found. Of the seven that were considered legally competent, four wanted the film shown. In 1991 Superior Court Judge Andrew Meyer vacated prior orders and allowed the film to be released. The judge required there to be a short statement at the end of the film saying that conditions have improved.

Was the dignity of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts or the dignity of humanity at risk here?

May I ask just why I need this help that you are literally forcing on me. Obviously I talk well, I think well, I am well, and you are ruining me. I don't want to say here. I am a prisoner. 

You can buy a copy of Titicut Follies here.

You'll have to figure out on your own where you can find humanity for these forgotten people.

To read more about the forgotten people with mental illness who populated asylums read: Unbearable: Asylums in Serbia and Kosovo; Hidden From View: the Medfield Insane Asylum; The Opal: Alpina; Extraordinary Escapes of a Lunatic; The New Asylums; In the House of Dementia: Love and Compassion; Northern Ohio Lunatic Asylum; My First Trip to the Asylum; The View From Here: Welcome to the Almshouse Edition; The View From Here: Patients Downstairs Edition; Field of (Broken) Dreams; Dinner is Served: Asylum Kitchens; The Views from There: Abandoned Lives Edition; We Too Have Lived; Medfield Insane Asylum;  and New Orleans City Asylum