Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Straitjackets

Episode Date: April 10, 2024

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.

Buenas, buenas, mis amores. This is Vico Ortiz, host of Dave, My Abuelita First, each week. Myself, alongside our resident abuelita, Liliana Montenegro, esa soy yo! play matchmaker for a group of hopeful romantics in this fun, flirty, and hilarious game show. Let's see if cheese bus will fly, or if these singles will be sent back to the dating apps.

Listen to Dave, My Abuelita First on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. ["Short Stuff"] 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. 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. 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 Hoekstra wrote about him. And essentially- Yeah, part of this came from How Stuff Works, a little bit of it. Okay, cool. Yeah, I thought I recognized that.

So straight jackets came around in the Georgian period, way more recently than I thought I recognized that. So, straight jackets came around in the Georgian period way more recently than I thought. Some people say about 1770 around then. 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 can 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 tightly. That's where the word straight comes from. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Straight as in A-I-T. Yeah, straight laced, meaning tightly drawn or tight fitting. Yeah, not straight as in straight and narrow. No, and not straights like Ludacris' old restaurant in Atlanta. I didn't know he had one. They had a dessert that was chocolate soup,

which from what I could tell is just watered down chocolate. You know, the Falcons 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 Ludacris came down from the ceiling of Mercedes Benz dome. Nice. Like, strapped into a thing. A straight jacket? With like a GoPro on a selfie stick. That's awesome, man. Like hundreds of feet in the air.

It was pretty amazing. I would have lost my mind with fear had it been him. 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 17th and 18th centuries. And in 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. 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.

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 III 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 Mandus of King George. Great movie. I had not seen it, but I do know that he was considered barking mad as they would have 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 porphyria. He could have also had severe mental illness But he was confined in a straitjacket very famously by his doctor Francis Willis Francis Willis also Seemingly cured George the third too and very publicly so. And so King George III 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. Yeah. You should totally see that movie. It's great. Okay. Like capital G. Great. Who's that? David Keith? No, Nigel Hawthorne is King George. Ian Holm is Dr. Francis. Helen Mirren's in it. It's really, really good. Okay, I'll check it out. So in the 1910s, of course, is when we saw the straight jacket worn by Houdini So, in the 1910s, 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 a curtain up. But his brother, actually, Theodore Hardeen, used the straight jacket before Houdini, evidently, and I think Houdini might have ganked that from his bro.

Yeah, you know, we did a whole episode on Houdini. It was a good one. It was. Speaking of good ones, I say we take a message break. Let's do it. Well, now when you're on the road, driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck? It's stuff you should know. All right.

Who hasn't heard names like Achilles or Odysseus, Cassandra, Medusa? But how much do you know about them from the ancient world? Let's talk about Myths, Baby is the podcast bringing the ancient sources to life. Greek myth and history is timeless and unless you've been living under a rock you have seen just how true that is today. But there is so much more to these characters and stories than what pop culture can do justice. I'm Liv Albert, the host of Let's Talk About Myths, baby, and every week I bring you stories from the ancient world, both mythological and historical, to breathe new life into these thousands of years old stories.

I'm also regularly joined by some of the most brilliant names in the field of archaeology and ancient history, authors of your favorite retellings from today, and everyone in between. Join me as I dive into the wild world of the ancient Greeks and their stories. Listen to Let's Talk About Myths, baby, on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Hooker Game, criminals and libertines in the South, and I am your host, Dr. Lindsay Byron. Three years ago, I came across a gold mine of news clippings detailing a scandal that rocked my small southern hometown.

As I flipped through each page, this forgotten story came back to life. I was told that it was just supposed to be a massage parlor. The big shot in that was Barker. He beats me continuously. If you print anything that you hear in that grand jury, you will be put in jail. I never gave any massages. Listen to Hooker Gay Criminals and Libertines in the South on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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 used much at all. They are pretty outdated. Now 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 1829 at Lincoln Asylum

where someone actually like strangled themselves with their straightitjacket? Yeah, they were strapped to the bed in a straitjacket and left overnight and when they returned they had strangled themselves or had been strangled by their Straitjacket overnight and all the way back in 1829 this asylum Lincoln asylum Banned the use of straitjackets. So even as far back as that within a few decades of their invention 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 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. 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 themself or to other people, you can, against their will, inject them with the sedative to restrain them. So it's chemical restraints, or we also have different non-confrontational techniques and I looked that up cause 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's 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. You just take them to a low sensory environment and just talk to them like a human being. That's the new technique now instead of straight jackets or chains. 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. And one has a net and one has a trident. Yeah. I mean, it really is a, it really is almost 100% a 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. 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. Yeah for sure sure. There is a company, and I don't know if it was, this might have been from the House of Works article, I'm not sure. But there is a company in Winnocki, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, Wisconsin, called Humane Restraint. And I read that the first 12 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? No, but I did look up Suicide Smocks. 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 restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, restrain, side smocks which is you can't like roll them up like to hang yourself or tear pieces off or whatever. No it's a it's a it's a dress made out as a gown made out of a moving blanket. No I know but the whole point is you can't roll it up and use it as a noose yeah or or tear it. No I know it makes total sense but it's made out of moving blanket material. Yes, exactly. For sure. And the company that makes these make less than a hundred straight jackets a year. They're called Humane Jackets on the website.

And if you were to hazard a guess how much they cost, what would you, what would be your guess? Nice leather strapping. Oh, yeah? Yeah, looks top of the line stuff. Canvas, of course. $1,700, Drew. My friend, you can get a humane jacket for $225.

What? Yeah, it was much cheaper than I thought. Wow, that's probably pleather then. It may be, but they had a, it's just an interesting website to think that, wow, there's a company that just makes this stuff. But like, what a market to corner. I think the interesting thing is they interviewed someone from there and they were like, hospitals aren't buying these anymore at all, obviously.

We sell maybe 100 of them a year and 100% of them are to jails and prisons. Yeah, that's the depressing fact of this podcast. Totally. In 2014, a group called Treatment Advocacy Center said that, pointed out that jails, house jails and prisons, house 10 times more seriously men and little people than state psychiatric hospitals do.

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. 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 deem you a threat or whatever, they can put you in a prison and if you're a danger, they deem you a threat or whatever,

they can put you in a straight jacket. 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? Well, my friend, you and I saw Alice Cooper in concert together in person, so we know Alice Cooper does.

Yeah, thanks to an invitation from Hurricane Nita herself. That's right, who else? Johnny Rotten very famously wore one in the Save the Queen, God Save the Queen video, the sex pistols. Yeah, and Quiet Riot. Quiet Riot wasn't even in that article that I found that mentioned these others.

No. But they did. Right there on the cover. You did some excellent extra research. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Well then, straight check, it's his apps. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio.

For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.