Gender and Psychiatric Confinement in The Snake Pit

By the mid-twentieth century, states across the United States housed hundreds of thousands of people in mental hospitals involuntarily. At the same moment that this mental-health industrial complex reached its peak, critics came out against the overcrowded and underfunded it. One of the most prominent critiques was The Snake Pit, a semi-autobiographical novel written in 1946 by Mary Jane Ward, a white, female former patient. In it, Ward compared the state-run psychiatric hospital to a prison, arguing that it did not make people better, but scared them into sanity. She wrote that the team of white men misdiagnosed the main character, drugged her, and performed electroshock treatment without her consent. The nameless nurses, psychiatrists, and administrators embodied the state’s power to remove her from her home and direct her treatment. The Snake Pit became a national bestseller and even an award-winning film in 1948. The movie twisted Ward’s intent, however. While the book depicted psychiatrists as unhelpful, the depicted them as saviors who located the origins of her mental illness to her parents and a fraught romantic past. Ward’s story shows how patient-authors used their writings to challenge their diagnoses and treatments at a time when their power was greatly limited. At the same time, it reveals how filmmakers and journalists reframed stories like Ward's to reify the gendered and sexualized conceptions of marginalized people with mental illness and continue to conceive of them as needing confinement by the state.