Frances Farmer
Compared in the media to Greta Garbo, Frances Farmer shot to fame in
the thirties and forties with her successes on Broadway and in
Hollywood. Along the way, though, she had become addicted to
amphetamines to control her weight and one night in 1943, after
drinking heavily, the naturally feisty actress got into a fight and
was arrested. The court placed her in custody of psychiatrist Thomas
Leonard and for years she remained in psychiatric institutions. To
subdue her she was given over 90 insulin shock treatments, then
extensive electroshock therapy and finally "hydrotherapy," in which
she was stripped naked and thrown into a tub of ice water for six to
eight hours at a time. Later she was raped and abused by orderlies
in the institution and was held down by them to be raped again by
drunken soldiers from a neighboring military base. |
She was
used as an experimental subject for powerful psychiatric drugs.
Finally she was brought into a closed room by Walter Freeman, the
name who had developed the lobotomy. She was never the same again.
Marilyn
Monroe
On August 4, 1962 Marilyn Monroe died from an overdose of
psychiatric drugs. She had spent six hours that day with her
psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, who for years had been prescribing
large amounts of barbiturates for her. Marilyn's biographer, Donald
Spoto, concluded that Greenson had beaten Marilyn also, and the
records of the doctor's visit by Marilyn for black eyes and a
possible broken nose substantiated that claim. Monroe made 23 movies
in the seven years prior to her involvement with psychiatry. She
made only six films in the seven years after she started her
"treatment." |
Vivien Leigh
Vivian Leigh, Oscar-winning actress and star of Gone with the Wind,
began experiencing attacks of hysteria in 1946 after she became
exhausted while performing on stage in London. Further bouts
occurred in 1952 and her husband convinced her to see a
psychiatrist. Her hysteria worsened and she ended up in an institution,
packed in ice, fed raw eggs and given electroshock therapy (EST) as her
"treatment." She once had to perform in Warsaw with the EST burn
marks still on her head. Her headaches from the electroshock became
too debilitating so she was prescribed psychotropic drugs instead.
In 1967 she was diagnosed again with TB and two months later a friend
found her dead, face down on the floor, drowned from the fluid in
her own lungs. Her true illness, TB, which is known to produce
psychiatric like symptoms, may have been misdiagnosed for years. |
Judy Garland
At 17, a year after she played Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, Judy
Garland was prescribed amphetamines and phenobarbital to control her
appetite. By 18 sleeping pills were added to offset the effects of
the other psychotropic drugs. Soon she was under the "care" of
psychiatrist Dr. Frederick Hacker, and her prescribed diet of
Dexedrine and the Seconal produced even more anxiety for the
troubled actress. In 1949 she was given electroshock and after that,
hypnosis. In the fifties she suffered a dangerously swollen liver
and spleen due to her drug intake, but in the sixties she was put on
even more psychiatric drugs. She ended up taking 40 Ritalin a day
and having hallucinations before she died of a drug overdose in
1969, despondent because none of the dozen psychiatrists she'd seen
had ever really helped her. |
