0:04

Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's

0:06

Chuck, and we've got Jerry all wrapped up,

0:08

so that means this is an episode of short

0:10

Stuff.

0:12

Yeah, that's right. You

0:14

know, I don't know why I thought of this. I may have,

0:17

I don't know. Maybe I was listening to Quiet Ride

0:19

or something because the idea of

0:21

straight jackets popped into my head and

0:24

I was just wondering. I was like, you know, you see you still

0:26

see that stuff in TV and movies. Yeah,

0:28

but I was like, is that still

0:30

a thing? And it turns out not so

0:33

much.

0:33

No, not so much. How Stuff Works did an article

0:36

recently on straight jackets,

0:38

and I also saw a really good article

0:41

on a site called history Hit, which I hadn't

0:43

heard before, but a guy named Kyle Hoachstro wrote

0:45

about him and it's.

0:46

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

0:48

of it.

0:49

Okay, cool, Yeah, I thought I recognized

0:51

that. So street jackets

0:53

came around in the Georgian period,

0:55

way more recently than I thought. Some people

0:58

say about seventeen seven around them,

1:01

and they're exactly what we think

1:03

of them today, which is they

1:07

were used to prevent people

1:10

with severe mental illness from

1:13

harming themselves and others by

1:16

preventing them from moving their arms. They

1:18

could still throw their torso at you, but

1:21

they couldn't like strangle you or smack you, or

1:23

punch you or choke you or anything like that, because

1:26

their arms were tied around their back through these

1:28

overly long sleeves that

1:31

were attached to a jacket. Hence the

1:33

straight jacket, very very tightly.

1:35

That's where the word straight comes from.

1:37

Yeah, yeah, exactly, straight as in a

1:40

t.

1:41

Yes, straight laced, meaning tightly drawn

1:43

or tight fitting.

1:44

Yeah, not straight as in straight and narrow.

1:47

No, and not straights like Ludacris's

1:50

old restaurant in Atlanta.

1:52

I didn't know he had one.

1:53

They had to dessert. It was chocolate soup,

1:56

which from what I could tell, is just water down chocolate.

1:59

You know the Falcons. I

2:01

have season tickets and they have different themes usually,

2:04

and one week it was the history of hip hop, and so

2:06

there was all kinds of people that

2:08

came out and sang during the breaks and stuff timeouts,

2:11

and at one point, Ludicrous came

2:14

down from the ceiling of Mercedes Ben's

2:16

dome nice like strapped

2:18

into a thing a

2:20

straight jacket with like a GoPro on

2:22

a selfie stick.

2:23

That's awesome.

2:24

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

2:26

amazing.

2:27

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

2:30

We were all pretty delighted. So straight

2:33

jackets have sort of risen and fallen and lockstep

2:35

with the what

2:37

they used to call, you know, insane

2:39

asylums. We don't use that term anymore, but these

2:42

asylums really grew over

2:45

a couple of hundred years in the seventeenth

2:47

and eighteenth centuries, and lockstep

2:50

so did the use of straight jackets. They

2:53

were heavily used for a while, like you said, just

2:55

to keep people from hurting themselves

2:57

or others. And their rationale at the time was sort

2:59

of like, hey, listen, at least you can move

3:01

around. We're not like chaining you to a

3:04

bed or something like that. Yeah, so

3:06

you can get up and walk around. At least it's

3:08

a little more humane

3:10

than the alternative. But

3:13

things started to change as things changed

3:16

in how we looked at treating mental illness.

3:18

Yeah, and one of the things there was actually a

3:21

strange turning point where

3:23

they started to go out around the

3:25

time that King George, the third of England

3:28

who was running the show when the American

3:30

colonies declared independence and fought England

3:33

for independence and won. By the way

3:37

he was. There was a very famous

3:39

movie and I believe book called The Mandess of King George.

3:41

Great movie.

3:42

I had not seen it, but I did you know that he

3:44

was considered barking mad,

3:47

as they were to put it back in the day he

3:49

had. They're not quite sure what he

3:51

had. They think possibly even had a metabolic

3:53

disorder called porphyria, and wasn't mentally

3:55

ill at all, but these were just symptoms of porfyria.

3:58

He could have also had severe mental illness, but

4:00

he was confined in a straight jacket, very

4:03

famously by his doctor,

4:05

Francis Willis. Francis

4:07

Willis also seemingly

4:09

cured George the Third two and

4:12

very publicly so. And so King

4:14

George the Third represented the

4:17

end of straight jackets because

4:19

he also represented the beginning of the

4:21

concept, at least in England and the Colonies,

4:23

that mental illness could in fact be cured,

4:26

and that created a revolution in how

4:28

we treated the mentally ill. From that point on, it

4:30

all pivoted in the In One King.

4:34

Yeah, you should totally see that movie. It's

4:36

great, okay, like Capital g.

4:38

Grade, who's a David Keith.

4:40

No, Nigel Hawthorne is King George. And you

4:42

think David ian

4:45

Holme is Doctor Francis Helen Myrens

4:47

in it. It's it's really really.

4:48

Good, Okay, I'll check it out.

4:50

So in the nineteen tents, of course, is when

4:53

we saw the straight jacket worn by Houdini as

4:56

a way to do a stunt in

4:58

full view of the audience, rather than holding curtain

5:00

up. But his brother,

5:03

actually, Theodore Harden, used

5:05

the straight jacket before Houdini, evidently, and I

5:07

think Houdini might have ganked that from his bro.

5:09

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

5:12

It was a good, good one.

5:13

It was speaking of good ones. I say

5:15

we take a message break, let's

5:18

do it.

5:19

Well, now we're on the road,

5:22

driving in your truck. I want to learn

5:24

a thing or two from Josh,

5:26

PM Chuck.

5:27

It's stuff you should know.

5:29

Should all right, Final

5:39

Josh and shock shot.

5:49

So these days, if you're not watching

5:51

movies or television where you still see

5:53

tons of straight jackets, you're probably

5:55

not going to see them use much at all. They

5:58

are pretty outdated. Now

6:01

we have. We have

6:03

all kinds of different things, from better treatments, better

6:05

medication, better techniques, more

6:08

staff. The idea

6:10

of just sort of the idea

6:13

of restricting someone's liberties

6:16

by physically restraining them like that is

6:18

just sort of an outdated way to look at stuff.

6:22

They can also be deadly. I think

6:24

there was a case in eighteen twenty nine at

6:26

Lincoln Asylum where someone actually strangled

6:29

themselves with their straight jacket.

6:31

Yeah, they were strapped to the bed in a street jacket

6:33

and left overnight, and when they returned they

6:35

had strangled themselves or had been strangled

6:37

by their straight jacket overnight, and all the

6:39

way back in eighteen twenty nine this asylum,

6:42

Lincoln Asylum, banned

6:45

the use of straight jackets. So even as far

6:47

back as that, within a few decades

6:49

of their invention, they already had a

6:51

bad name as being dangerous, despite being considered

6:53

a more humane alternative to chaining somebody,

6:56

which it was. You could say, but

6:59

yeah, like you said, we now have different, like

7:01

different techniques to We

7:05

do have physical restraints still, they're usually

7:07

like super fuzzy wrist

7:10

and arm restraints, but they use those as a last

7:12

resort, right if a patient.

7:15

In this is the United States. I'm not sure about

7:17

some of the other countries that hear us, but

7:20

in the United States, if a patient is dangerous

7:22

or presents a clear danger

7:25

to themselves or to other people, you

7:27

can, against their

7:29

will, inject them with the centative to restrain

7:32

them. So it's chemical restraints or

7:34

we also have different non confrontational

7:36

techniques. And I look that up because I was curious

7:39

what that amounts to, and it is

7:41

the most like low hanging fruit that apparently

7:43

works. If a patient is agitated,

7:46

you get them away from whatever is agitating

7:48

them, and then you ask them what's wrong? What

7:51

can I do to help you? What do you need

7:53

to feel better about things? And that this works,

7:55

he's just take them to a low sensory environment

7:57

and just talk to them like a human being.

8:00

That's that's the new technique now, instead

8:02

of straight jackets or chains.

8:04

Yeah, because I imagine being approached

8:06

by like three big dudes

8:08

holding up a straight jacket is not going to lower the

8:10

temperature at all.

8:11

And one has a net and one has a trident.

8:14

Yeah, I mean it really is. It

8:17

really is an almost one trope

8:20

because like these things went out of fashion so long

8:22

ago, but movies and TV just kept

8:24

using that same trope because it just

8:27

is such a signal for

8:30

what you're to say, what kind of person

8:32

this is, which is a danger.

8:34

I think if there's any through thread

8:36

to stuff you should know, and there are many,

8:39

but definitely that we've been

8:41

grossly misinformed and misguided

8:44

by TVs and movies over the years.

8:46

It's definitely a thread of stuff you should know.

8:49

Yeah, for sure, there is a

8:51

company and I don't know if it was this

8:53

might have been from the House of Works article. Sure,

8:56

but uh, there is a company in uh

8:59

Wanaki, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, Wisconsin

9:02

called Humane Restraint

9:05

and I read that the first twelve times as

9:07

human Restraint, which I thought was

9:09

the worst funny name

9:11

for a company that did this. Sure, but

9:13

it's actually a great name because it's Humane Restraint.

9:15

It's a company that makes this stuff. Did

9:18

you go to the website and look around?

9:20

No, but I did look up suicide smocks.

9:22

Well, just peruse Humane

9:25

Restraint the website at some point, because

9:28

it's just one of those things where you are sort

9:30

of shocked to realize

9:33

that there are, of course, a company

9:35

makes this stuff. This company makes

9:37

all the bed restraints. They make

9:39

this safe furniture that you

9:41

can't like hurt yourself on gum me furniture.

9:44

They make the suicide smocks, which is

9:47

you can't like roll

9:49

them up like to hang yourself or tear

9:51

pieces off or whatever.

9:52

No, it's a dress

9:55

made out as a gown made out of a moving blanket.

9:58

No, I know, but the the whole point is you

10:01

can't roll it up and use it as a noose,

10:03

yeah, or tear it.

10:04

No, I know, it makes total sense. But it's made

10:06

out of moving blanket material.

10:08

Yes, exactly for sure. And the

10:10

company that makes these make less

10:13

than one hundred straight jackets a year. They're called

10:15

Humane jackets on the website.

10:17

And if you were a hazard to guess how much

10:20

they cost, what would you it

10:22

would be your guess? Nice leather strapping,

10:24

Oh yeah, yeah, it looks top

10:26

of the line stuff canvas of.

10:28

Course, seventeen hundred

10:30

dollars, drew.

10:32

My friend. You can get a humane

10:35

jacket for two hundred and twenty five bucks.

10:38

What, Yeah, it was much

10:40

cheaper than I thought.

10:41

Wow, that's probably plether then it.

10:43

May be, but they had it's just an interesting

10:45

website to think that. Wow, there's a company

10:48

that just makes this stuff, but like a

10:50

what a market to corner. I

10:53

think the interesting thing is is they

10:55

interviewed someone from there and they were like, hospitals

10:57

aren't buying these anymore at all.

11:00

Obviously, we sell maybe one hundred of them a

11:02

year, and one hundred percent of

11:04

them are to jails and prisons.

11:06

Yeah, that's the depressing fact

11:08

of this podcast totally. In

11:10

twenty fourteen, a group called Treatment Advocacy

11:13

Center said that pointed out that

11:15

jails, How's jails and prisons

11:17

house ten times more seriously

11:20

ment a little people than state psychiatric

11:22

hospitals too. And the reason

11:24

why that's a little bit of a three

11:27

card Monty move right there, because there

11:30

are no state psychiatric hospitals anymore

11:32

because of Ronald Reagan.

11:35

And of course the reason they're also using straight

11:37

jackets is because they don't they're

11:39

not hospitals and they don't have to play by the same rules

11:42

of humane treatment, so they

11:44

could. You could still be in a prison and if you're

11:47

a danger they demio a threat or

11:49

whatever, they can put you in a straight jacket.

11:52

So, Chuck, I'm a rocker and

11:54

I really loved your Quiet Riot

11:56

reference who else has worn straight

11:58

jackets in the music industry over the years.

12:01

Well, my friend you and I would saw Alice

12:03

Cooper in concert together in person, so

12:05

we know Alice Cooper does.

12:06

Yeah, thanks to an invitation from Hurricane Nieder

12:08

herself.

12:09

That's right. Who else?

12:11

Johnny Rotten very famously wore one in

12:13

the Save the Queen,

12:15

God, Save the Queen video the

12:19

sex Pistols.

12:20

Yeah, quite right, that quite right. Wouldn't

12:22

even in that article that I found that mentioned

12:24

these others?

12:25

No, but they just right

12:27

there on the cover. You did some extra, excellent,

12:30

extra research. You

12:32

got anything else?

12:33

I got nothing else?

12:34

Well, then street Check.

12:35

It's his apps.

12:39

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12:42

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