Short Stuff: Straitjackets - podcast episode cover

Short Stuff: Straitjackets

Apr 10, 202413 min
--:--
--:--
Listen in podcast apps:

Episode description

Straitjackets aren't really a thing anymore unless you're watching a movie or TV show. Or in prison. That's the sad truth.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Speaker 1

Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, and we've got Jerry all wrapped up, so that means this is an episode of short Stuff.

Speaker 2

Yeah, that's right. You know, I don't know why I thought of this. I may have, I don't know. Maybe I was listening to Quiet Ride or something because the idea of straight jackets popped into my head and I was just wondering. I was like, you know, you see you still see that stuff in TV and movies. Yeah, but I was like, is that still a thing? And it turns out not so much.

Speaker 1

No, not so much. How Stuff Works did an article recently on straight jackets, and I also saw a really good article on a site called history Hit, which I hadn't heard before, but a guy named Kyle Hoachstro wrote about him and it's.

Speaker 2

Part of this came from How Stuff Works. A little bit of it.

Speaker 1

Okay, cool, Yeah, I thought I recognized that. So street jackets came around in the Georgian period, way more recently than I thought. Some people say about seventeen seven around them, and they're exactly what we think of them today, which is they were used to prevent people with severe mental illness from harming themselves and others by preventing them from

moving their arms. They could still throw their torso at you, but they couldn't like strangle you or smack you, or punch you or choke you or anything like that, because their arms were tied around their back through these overly long sleeves that were attached to a jacket. Hence the straight jacket, very very tightly. That's where the word straight comes from.

Speaker 2

Yeah, yeah, exactly, straight as in a t.

Speaker 1

Yes, straight laced, meaning tightly drawn or tight fitting.

Speaker 2

Yeah, not straight as in straight and narrow.

Speaker 1

No, and not straights like Ludacris's old restaurant in Atlanta.

Speaker 2

I didn't know he had one.

Speaker 1

They had to dessert. It was chocolate soup, which from what I could tell, is just water down chocolate.

Speaker 2

You know the Falcons. I have season tickets and they have different themes usually, and one week it was the history of hip hop, and so there was all kinds of people that came out and sang during the breaks and stuff timeouts, and at one point, Ludicrous came down from the ceiling of Mercedes Ben's dome nice like strapped into a thing a straight jacket with like a GoPro on a selfie stick.

Speaker 1

That's awesome.

Speaker 2

Man, Like hundreds of feet in the air. It was pretty amazing.

Speaker 1

I would have lost my mind with fear head of been.

Speaker 2

We were all pretty delighted. So straight jackets have sort of risen and fallen and lockstep with the what they used to call, you know, insane asylums. We don't use that term anymore, but these asylums really grew over a couple of hundred years in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and lockstep so did the use of straight jackets. They were heavily used for a while, like you said, just

to keep people from hurting themselves or others. And their rationale at the time was sort of like, hey, listen, at least you can move around. We're not like chaining you to a bed or something like that. Yeah, so you can get up and walk around. At least it's a little more humane than the alternative. But things started to change as things changed in how we looked at treating mental illness.

Speaker 1

Yeah, and one of the things there was actually a strange turning point where they started to go out around the time that King George, the third of England who was running the show when the American colonies declared independence and fought England for independence and won. By the way he was. There was a very famous movie and I believe book called The Mandess of King George.

Speaker 2

Great movie.

Speaker 1

I had not seen it, but I did you know that he was considered barking mad, as they were to put it back in the day he had. They're not quite sure what he had. They think possibly even had a metabolic disorder called porphyria, and wasn't mentally ill at all, but these were just symptoms of porfyria. He could have also had severe mental illness, but he was confined in a straight jacket, very famously by his doctor, Francis Willis. Francis Willis also seemingly cured George the Third two and

very publicly so. And so King George the Third represented the end of straight jackets because he also represented the beginning of the concept, at least in England and the Colonies, that mental illness could in fact be cured, and that created a revolution in how we treated the mentally ill. From that point on, it all pivoted in the In One King.

Speaker 2

Yeah, you should totally see that movie. It's great, okay, like Capital g.

Speaker 1

Grade, who's a David Keith.

Speaker 2

No, Nigel Hawthorne is King George. And you think David ian Holme is Doctor Francis Helen Myrens in it. It's it's really really.

Speaker 1

Good, Okay, I'll check it out.

Speaker 2

So in the nineteen tents, of course, is when we saw the straight jacket worn by Houdini as a way to do a stunt in full view of the audience, rather than holding curtain up. But his brother, actually, Theodore Harden, used the straight jacket before Houdini, evidently, and I think Houdini might have ganked that from his bro.

Speaker 1

Yeah. You know, we did a whole episode on Houdini.

Speaker 2

It was a good, good one.

Speaker 1

It was speaking of good ones. I say we take a message break, let's do it.

Speaker 3

Well, now we're on the road, driving in your truck. I want to learn a thing or two from Josh, PM Chuck.

Speaker 1

It's stuff you should know.

Speaker 3

Should all right, Final Josh and shock shot.

Speaker 2

So these days, if you're not watching movies or television where you still see tons of straight jackets, you're probably not going to see them use much at all. They are pretty outdated. Now we have. We have all kinds of different things, from better treatments, better medication, better techniques, more staff. The idea of just sort of the idea of restricting someone's liberties by physically restraining them like that is just sort of an outdated way to look at stuff.

They can also be deadly. I think there was a case in eighteen twenty nine at Lincoln Asylum where someone actually strangled themselves with their straight jacket.

Speaker 1

Yeah, they were strapped to the bed in a street jacket and left overnight, and when they returned they had strangled themselves or had been strangled by their straight jacket overnight, and all the way back in eighteen twenty nine this asylum, Lincoln Asylum, banned the use of straight jackets. So even as far back as that, within a few decades of their invention, they already had a bad name as being dangerous, despite being considered a more humane alternative to chaining somebody,

which it was. You could say, but yeah, like you said, we now have different, like different techniques to We do have physical restraints still, they're usually like super fuzzy wrist and arm restraints, but they use those as a last resort, right if a patient. In this is the United States.

I'm not sure about some of the other countries that hear us, but in the United States, if a patient is dangerous or presents a clear danger to themselves or to other people, you can, against their will, inject them with the centative to restrain them. So it's chemical restraints or we also have different non confrontational techniques. And I look that up because I was curious what that amounts to, and it is the most like low hanging fruit that

apparently works. If a patient is agitated, you get them away from whatever is agitating them, and then you ask them what's wrong? What can I do to help you? What do you need to feel better about things? And that this works, he's just take them to a low sensory environment and just talk to them like a human being. That's that's the new technique now, instead of straight jackets or chains.

Speaker 2

Yeah, because I imagine being approached by like three big dudes holding up a straight jacket is not going to lower the temperature at all.

Speaker 1

And one has a net and one has a trident.

Speaker 2

Yeah, I mean it really is. It really is an almost one trope because like these things went out of fashion so long ago, but movies and TV just kept using that same trope because it just is such a signal for what you're to say, what kind of person this is, which is a danger.

Speaker 1

I think if there's any through thread to stuff you should know, and there are many, but definitely that we've been grossly misinformed and misguided by TVs and movies over the years. It's definitely a thread of stuff you should know.

Speaker 2

Yeah, for sure, there is a company and I don't know if it was this might have been from the House of Works article. Sure, but uh, there is a company in uh Wanaki, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, Wisconsin called Humane Restraint and I read that the first twelve times as human Restraint, which I thought was the worst funny name for a company that did this. Sure, but it's actually a great name because it's Humane Restraint.

It's a company that makes this stuff. Did you go to the website and look around?

Speaker 1

No, but I did look up suicide smocks.

Speaker 2

Well, just peruse Humane Restraint the website at some point, because it's just one of those things where you are sort of shocked to realize that there are, of course, a company makes this stuff. This company makes all the bed restraints. They make this safe furniture that you can't like hurt yourself on gum me furniture. They make the suicide smocks, which is you can't like roll them up like to hang yourself or tear pieces off or whatever.

Speaker 1

No, it's a dress made out as a gown made out of a moving blanket.

Speaker 2

No, I know, but the the whole point is you can't roll it up and use it as a noose, yeah, or tear it.

Speaker 1

No, I know, it makes total sense. But it's made out of moving blanket material.

Speaker 2

Yes, exactly for sure. And the company that makes these make less than one hundred straight jackets a year. They're called Humane jackets on the website. And if you were a hazard to guess how much they cost, what would you it would be your guess? Nice leather strapping, Oh yeah, yeah, it looks top of the line stuff canvas of.

Speaker 1

Course, seventeen hundred dollars, drew.

Speaker 2

My friend. You can get a humane jacket for two hundred and twenty five bucks. What, Yeah, it was much cheaper than I thought.

Speaker 1

Wow, that's probably plether then it.

Speaker 2

May be, but they had it's just an interesting website to think that. Wow, there's a company that just makes this stuff, but like a what a market to corner. I think the interesting thing is is they interviewed someone from there and they were like, hospitals aren't buying these anymore at all. Obviously, we sell maybe one hundred of them a year, and one hundred percent of them are to jails and prisons.

Speaker 1

Yeah, that's the depressing fact of this podcast totally. In twenty fourteen, a group called Treatment Advocacy Center said that pointed out that jails, How's jails and prisons house ten times more seriously ment a little people than state psychiatric hospitals too. And the reason why that's a little bit of a three card Monty move right there, because there are no state psychiatric hospitals anymore because of Ronald Reagan.

Speaker 2

And of course the reason they're also using straight jackets is because they don't they're not hospitals and they don't have to play by the same rules of humane treatment, so they could. You could still be in a prison and if you're a danger they demio a threat or whatever, they can put you in a straight jacket.

Speaker 1

So, Chuck, I'm a rocker and I really loved your Quiet Riot reference who else has worn straight jackets in the music industry over the years.

Speaker 2

Well, my friend you and I would saw Alice Cooper in concert together in person, so we know Alice Cooper does.

Speaker 1

Yeah, thanks to an invitation from Hurricane Nieder herself.

Speaker 2

That's right. Who else?

Speaker 1

Johnny Rotten very famously wore one in the Save the Queen, God, Save the Queen video the sex Pistols.

Speaker 2

Yeah, quite right, that quite right. Wouldn't even in that article that I found that mentioned these others?

Speaker 1

No, but they just right there on the cover. You did some extra, excellent, extra research. You got anything else?

Speaker 2

I got nothing else?

Speaker 1

Well, then street Check.

Speaker 2

It's his apps.

Speaker 1

Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2

For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit

Speaker 1

The iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Transcript source: Provided by creator in RSS feed: download file
Short Stuff: Straitjackets | Stuff You Should Know podcast - Listen or read transcript on Metacast