#(not a 'oh ill stop trialing and drill these skills' NO)

[abirddogmoment]

some thoughts about the pressures of trialing in dog sports and the emotional environment of trials, partially inspired by this post by the beautiful @mongrelization

this post happened to come at a time when I was at a decision point in my trial career with mav. he had just started refusing jumps (i thought it was a training issue at the time, i now know he was in pain) and he wasn't having fun. we were disconnected in the ring, with him choosing to go visit friends or just blow past obstacles without attempting them. it was frustrating and it was such a stark contrast from our training runs (not flawless but immeasurably better than our performances in the ring) and i was making jokes (as everyone does!) about mav being the worst, etc, etc.

except they weren't jokes.

they sounded like jokes and they even felt like jokes in the moment, but looking back i can confidently see that i was frustrated and resentful and the "lighthearted jokes" from other competitors and from myself were just fueling the fire. i saw darcies post shortly after a particularly frustrating trial where we just couldn't connect, i was trying to decide whether to push through and fix our issues or give up completely on agility.

her post wasn't an epiphany, i probably would've gotten there eventually, but her post that said, essentially hey its fucked up to make those jokes about your dog and its fucked up for people to make those jokes about your dog and thats not how a trial should be - something clicked. its NOT how it should be.

i took a break from trialing in everything and cut training way back and just took all the pressure off of mav while i got my internal emotional environment back on track. im a really competitive person and its hard to consciously dial that back, but more than that, it's legitimately embarrassing when things go wrong with people watching you. if your default is humor about it (like mine), its a hard shift to not make jokes about your dog when things go wrong. but its an important and necessary shift.

i started trialing him again after about 3 months off, very lightly. i stopped entering full weekends and opted to do half-days or only saturdays and he fucking THRIVED. i made time to meet all his needs before trials, i prioritized his happiness over technically correct courses, and i got over the embarrassment of excusing myself from a run if it was going downhill. i fixed my internal emotional environment and that fixed our disconnect and made every win more meaningful.

the thing is, i am 100% sure i would not have fixed my emotional environment if i was actively competing and practicing the same patterns. i absolutely had to take that step back to fix myself. you can't make meaningful change if youre still in the middle of it acting it out.

i lost out on trials with mav and that sucked so much in the moment. i had awful FOMO watching my friends compete and finish titles while we did little low-pressure walks at home. but ultimately i gained something so much more important, and looking back i can't bring myself to regret that at all.

#anyway here are some thoughts #its vulnerable dont look at me #i guess the tldr is: if youre stuck in the same pattern and things arent working #take a meaningful and legitimate break #(not a 'oh ill stop trialing and drill these skills' NO) #(an actual break where you take the pressure off you and your dog) #mav hurt himself from a freak accident that could happen to literally any dog that runs #if i had kept the pressure on i wouldve ruined the relationship we had built through training #take the break and take it for the right reasons (your and your dogs' emotional wellbeing) #you cant make meaningful change if you're actively practing your same patterns #i am so so so so so done with dogs lookjng miserable in the ring #if you are not having fun #of your dog is not having fun #if the vibe is 'frantic stressful manic' then i dont want to see it #(if you come at me about DrIvE i will block is2g this is not the post) #i want to see CONFIDENCE i want to see CONNECTION i want to see DELIGHT i want to see actual goodnatured HUMOR #i want to compliment you on the fsct that your dog looked happy #if (dog forbid) you lose your dog tomorrow #will looking back on your trial history bring you comfort? or will it make you sad because #you were always hoping that 'the next one will be better'? #and its okay if the answer is no #but if the answer is no - fix your shit #disclaimer this is not at anyone #this is a reflection of my personal Trauma #if you feel you must roast me about this consider: do not

[loretranscripts]

Lore Episode 6: Echoes (Transcript) - 18th May 2015

tw: mental illness, abuse, rape, death, mistreatment of mentally ill people, lobotomies, body horror, medical procedures, ableist language - generally, be very careful with this one

Disclaimer: This transcript is entirely non-profit and fan-made. All credit for this content goes to Aaron Mahnke, creator of Lore podcast. It is by a fan, for fans, and meant to make the content of the podcast more accessible to all. Also, there may be mistakes, despite rigorous re-reading on my part. Feel free to point them out, but please be nice!

The setting of a story is everything – it creates mood and atmosphere, it triggers memories, and helps our minds fill in the blanks, adding tension and suspense where there was only words and images. What would The Shining be like without the long hotel hallways of the Overlook, or The Legend of Hell House without the dusty bones of the old Belasco House, and how can anybody ever look at an old cabin in the woods without a chill running down their spine? Not me, that’s for sure. One of the most iconic and most visceral settings from any horror story, without a question, has always been the insane asylum. These days we refer to the institutions that treat mental disorders as psychiatric hospitals. They’re hard places to work – I know this first hand thanks to a colourful college internship that featured a double amputee who enjoyed streaking down the hallway on his knees. Mental health professionals do amazing work, but a lot more than just the name has changed than the name of these hospitals of the mind. In the late 1800s and through to the 1850s, asylums were a very different place. They were filled with sick people in need of help, but frequently they were only offered pain and suffering. When H. P. Lovecraft wrote The Thing on the Doorstep in 1933, he imagined a place that he called “Arkhum Sanitarium”. Arkhum is the seed, it’s the first of its kind; through it, Lovecraft brought the asylum into the horror genre, and others quickly caught on. The famous super-prison and mental hospital of the Batman universe, “Arkhum Asylum”, is a blatant and direct call-back to Lovecraft’s invention. Arkhum was a real place, though, known as the Danvers State Hospital. In fact, the remains of it stand just 8 miles from my front door, and even before construction began in 1874, the hospital’s story was already one of fear and suffering, a theme that continued unchecked well into the 20thcentury. I’m Aaron Mahnke, and the is Lore.

Before the days of institutional care for the mentally ill, the job was left largely to independent contractors – people who were hired by the state to look after others, but that was a system with far too many opportunities for failure. Patients were routinely placed in cages or stalls, and they were chained and beaten into submission. Violence, rape and death were everyday occurrences. Thankfully, people began to look for a better way, a more humane way of caring for these individuals, and those conversations led to the establishment of a new, state-of-the-art mental hospital. Plans started off on the wrong foot, though. The site that was chosen for the construction was the former homestead of John Hathorne, one of the nine magistrates who oversaw the witch trials of Salem in 1692. Hawthorne was known for his vicious, harsh attitude towards those who were accused of witchcraft, and he pushed hard for their execution. He was so well-known for his violent and hateful personality that his great-great-grandson, the author Nathaniel Hawthorne, changed the spelling of his last name, adding the “w”, to distance himself from that reputation. And it was there, on Hathorne Hill, that the foundations of the hospital were laid. The chances are pretty high that no one made the comparisons at the time, but hindsight is always 20/20, and looking back over the last century and a half, it’s clear that Hathorne’s legacy lived on atop that hill.

The Danvers State Hospital was actually intended to be a beacon of hope. There was a specific plan behind its design, one that was based on the work of Dr. Thomas Kirkbride. He designed the building with four radiating wings on each side of a central structure. His reason was simple: with more of the rooms exposed to sunlight and proper ventilation, more of the patients would experience recovery. All told, the hospital was designed to house 500 patients, covering a wide spectrum of mental illness, who were served by a team of roughly one dozen staff. When the doors finally opened in 1878, it was originally called the State Lunatic Hospital, and there was no other place like it in the country. It was set up to be a leader in the humane treatment of patients, and became the model for countless other facilities like it, and rightly so - this place was amazing. The ornate interiors, private rooms, sunny corridors, all connected to the central Kirkbride building. The patients were encouraged to exercise and participate in the community gardens outside. The small farm there even produced enough food for the hospital kitchen to feed the patients home-grown meals. Over time, though, the hospital expanded. There were separate Tuberculosis buildings, housing for staff, a machine shop, a medical building, and a pump house to pull water from the reservoir. All of these locations were connected underground by a network of dark, brick-lined tunnels, arranged in the shape of a wagon wheel to allow easy movement during the harsh New England winters. Bur the hospital campus wasn’t the only thing that was expanding.

As with all good things, the bright days of the Danvers State Hospital didn’t last long. More and more patients were admitted each year, and the staff continued to struggle with keeping up. In addition, decreased state funding prevented them from hiring more help. By the 1920s, the population had grown to almost 2000 patients, four times what the facility was designed to hold. One eyewitness reported that in November of 1945, the evening shift at the hospital consisted of nine people, and they were expected to care for the needs of nearly 2300 patients. You’ll have to pardon the expression, but things at the Danvers State Hospital had begun to get crazy. Patients were frequently sick and filthy. It was not uncommon for some to die unnoticed, only to be found days later. It was nearly impossible for the staff to manage so many patients, and so they turned to the acceptable tools of their time: straight jackets, solitary confinement, even restraints. However barbaric they may seem to us today, were mild compared to some of the other methods used by the staff. Patients were regularly subjected to hydrotherapy and electro-shock therapy, and yet it somehow still managed to get worse, and that’s where the lobotomy enters this story.

First pioneered by Dr. Walter Freeman in 1936, the lobotomy was a complicated procedure. The surgeon would literally cut the patient’s brain, severing the connection between the frontal lobes and the thalamus. The goal was to reduce symptoms and make patients more manageable. The results were mixed. Some patients died as a result of the procedure, while others would commit suicide later. Freeman, though, quickly grew tired of how long it took to complete the procedure. He heard of a doctor in Italy who had operated on his patients through their eye sockets. Working without drilling or cutting presented an opportunity that Freeman simply couldn’t pass up. He called his technique the “transorbital lobotomy”. It’s fairly easy to describe, but its not for the faint of heart. Freeman discovered that the only surgical tool he really needed was an ice-pick. According to his son, Franklin Freeman, in a PBS interview in 2008, those first ice-picks came right out of their kitchen icebox, and they worked like a charm. By inserting the ice-pick into the inner corner of a patient’s eye, Freeman could punch through the skull to reach the brain. Then he would essentially, um, stir the frontal lobe until it was no longer functional. Oh, and one more thing: he did all of this without anaesthetic.

And he got good at it, so good, in fact, that he took his show on the road. He literally toured the nation in a van that he called the “lobotomobile”, stopping at mental institutions, where he would educate and train the staff in his own technique. While he was there, he would perform as many lobotomies as they needed for the low, low cost of just $25 per patient. It sounds like Freeman was delivering the solution to a desperate industry, but that was pretty far from the truth. His patients often lost the ability to feed themselves or use the bathroom unassisted, and those skills would have to be retaught, if it was even possible. While many patients recovered, about 15% died from the procedure. Relapses were common, and sometimes the lobotomy would have to be reattempted. Once, in 1951, at Iowa’s Cherokee Mental Health Institute, Freeman stopped in the middle of a lobotomy, ice-pick clutched in his hand, so that he could pose for a photograph. The instrument penetrated a bit too far and the patient died. He never wore gloves or a mask, and he apparently had no limits. In fact, of the 3500 lobotomies that he performed in 23 states, 19 of those patients were minors - one of them, a four-year-old child. Ironically, some people still don’t believe in monsters.

The horror of institutional lobotomy ended in 1954 when a new drug was brought to the market. Thorazine was marketed as a chemical lobotomy, and the need for the surgical procedure dropped dramatically. But the nightmare never really stopped at Danvers State Hospital. During the 1980s, reports began to filter out about missing teenage patients. One account I managed to find said that upwards of 115 patients had disappeared in the space of about three months. The hospital never spoke about it publicly because their closure was already looming on the horizon. They knew that it was happening. When the staff was questioned they all pointed toward a new doctor on staff. In each case, they said these patients had been assigned to this new doctor upon admission, and then vanished. Scraps of paper were found in several of the patients’ rooms that mentioned a tall man in the woods. Some were drawings of the man, and some were simply too illegible to make out at all. As the pieces were slowly put together, it became clear that this doctor had been taking patients outside of the building, without permission, for unknown reasons. Eventually the police were called, and when they arrived to take the man into custody, they found that he, too, was gone, and his patients were never found.

But this was just one more tragedy in a long string of bad news that had wrapped itself around the Danvers State Hospital, beginning in the 1960s. Massive budget cuts, building closings and structural damage had all conspired to slowly push the doors closed. By 1985, nearly every building on campus was abandoned, and the Kirkbride administrative building itself even closed in 1989. The last remaining patients were moved to the medical building onsite, but were all eventually moved to other facilities with the help of the national guard and 80 ambulances. The hospital was officially abandoned in the summer of 1992, and stood vacant and derelict for nearly a decade. The rooms that once played host to mindless victims of Dr. Freeman and his ice-pick became the home of homeless squatters. They built their lives around the decaying medical equipment, the wheelchairs, the bedframes… It’s probably the healthiest inmate population the building had known for decades. In 2005, the property was bought by a developer, and much of the campus was demolished to make way for a sprawling apartment complex. But they left the front façade of the Kirkbride building, with its soaring Gothic towers and intricate brickwork. But the hospital, it didn’t go quietly. In April of 2007, four of the apartment buildings, as well as a handful of construction trailers, mysteriously burnt down. It was a fire so big that it was visible from Boston, 17 miles to the south. There was an investigation, but it turned up no evidence other than webcam footage from the construction site, which inexplicably cut out just before the fire began.

The image of an asylum will forever hold a place in our hearts as something to be feared and avoided. Whether new and sunny, or ancient and decaying, the asylum is a setting that causes people to back away, a ball of terror rising in their stomachs. But why? On a rational level, these were places of hope for many people. Still, the very concept of a residential hospital for the mentally ill, complete with 19th century décor and equipment, is the stuff of nightmares. Perhaps what we really fear is losing control over ourselves. Restraints, locked rooms, medication and irreversible medical procedures represent for many of us the opposite of freedom. We fear losing our dignity, losing our well-being, losing our very minds. Death, however, is chasing all of us. The curse of mortality is that we are already handing those things over, day by day, until the time when there’s nothing left to give. Perhaps the stereotypical asylum simply reminds us of the inevitable truth that is our own death.

The Danvers State Hospital is nearly gone today, but reminders still linger of its presence. Besides the brick façade of the Kirkbride building, one of the roads there is even called “Kirkbride Drive”. The reservoir that provided the facility with its water can be found behind the apartment buildings, and that vast network of ancient tunnels is still there as well, snaking its way beneath the modern structures, and the people who live inside them. One final reminder awaits people who come for a visit, though. The old asylum cemetery. Its where the staff buried patients who died and went unclaimed by family. There are no tall tombstones, though. Instead, each grave is marked by a small, square stone with a number engraved on it, and there are hundreds of them. Anyone looking for the cemetery will know that they’ve found it when they see a large boulder that marks the entrance. It was placed there in recent past to explain why all those small, square stones are there. But it’s the message engraved on it, and not the grave markers themselves, that communicates everything we need to know. It simply reads: “The echoes they left behind”.

Lore is a biweekly podcast and was produced by me, Aaron Mahnke. You can find out more about this episode, including the background music, at lorepodcast.com, and be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook at lorepodcast. Your ratings and reviews on ITunes make all the difference for this show, so please take a moment today to fill one out. You can find links to help you do that at lorepodcast.com/support. Oh, and if you enjoy scary stories, I happen to write them. You can find a full list of my supernatural thrillers, available in paperback and ebook formats, at aaronmahnke.com/novels. Thanks for listening.

Notes

1. I just wanted to note that the story of “the tall man in the woods” is in fact inaccurate, and based on an edit someone made to the Wikipedia page on Danvers State Hospital, which was based on a creepy pasta they had written. It was only up for a week, but that happened to be the week during which Aaron was researching.

#lore podcast #podcasts #aaron mahnke #danvers state hospital #asylum #asylum horror #h. p. lovecraft #lobotomy #icepick lobotomy #hauntings #transcripts #6