#girliepop why would you tell that to your child whta the fukc were you thinking

[yappersparadise]

How a childhood movie ruined my relationship with the medical system

I've been rewatching a lot of childhood movies lately. I picked Return To Oz today. This movie was one of the things that contributed to my near delusional fear of mental health professionals. Like at the beginning of the movie Dorothy's primary caregivers abandon her at a grimy sanitarium with childist adults. After they're gone, multiple doctors pick her up, strap her to a table, and Dorothy narrowly avoids getting electrocuted Frankenstein's monster style. I am not kidding

This movie terrified me as a kid, it was my first ever experience with horror despite the producers apparently not intending for it to be a horror film. Rewatching it now I can understand that it really isn't as bad as I thought it was at the time. I guess even as a kid it didn't give me nightmares or make me cry, or anything. I never felt panicked while watching it, but it did instil me with a deep, deep sense of dread. There are other scenes in the movie that invoke the same feeling of powerful unease and discomfort, but what always stuck with me most was that particular scene where she's being belted down.

Dorothy escapes with a beautiful blonde girl. Her hair is light and feathery, and it catches the light in a way reminiscent of a halo. At one point she silently appears in Dorothy's room, already knowing Dorothy's name. There was no sound of the door opening, nothing to suggest she hadn't just appeared there. She felt completely otherworldly, and she moved with a wisdom and grace that ultimately led Dorothy to escape

At one point while they're desperately running through mud and bracken during a storm, thunder and lightning raging above them as the sanitarium workers tear after them, they have this interaction:

GIRL: Quick! We have to get you out of here. DOROTHY: What's that screaming? GIRL: Patients who have been damaged, locked in the cellar.

Whhhhhhhhhhhhhat the fuuuuck that line messed me up as a kid. The girl speaks with such confidence, she seems to be so trustworthy, and almost authoritative, that I couldn't help but believe her instantly. What did it mean to be "damaged" by electric shock therapy? Physically damaged? Mentally damaged? The screaming didn't sound right. I didn't know what lobotomies were as a kid but I got the gist of it.

I think what scared me most was how real it was to me. The exact same thing had happened to my grandad. My dad described the things the doctors did to him in detail, the way they had to put rubber in his mouth so he didn't bite his tongue off while they shocked him at a high voltage over and over, how they tortured him with ice baths and forced him on medication

It was not only something that the protagonist of the movie had narrowly avoided, but something that was a very real threat. A very real threat that could, as I realised then, even effect children like me. Medical abuse cases against autistic people are a dime a dozen. Now I'm older I know it's probably unlikely that it'll happen to me in the present day. But I can never be too sure, and even to this day I refuse to surrender myself to the potential danger of that kind of treatment

But anyway one of the other characters from Return To Oz is so babygirl

Never in my life have I wanted to call a character babygirl but this is the one. He's just so sweet and kind and silly. If you don't get it that's fine I just wanted to show you all that he exists