Eighteen months in a small private psychiatric home, completely isolated from the outside world in every way, can have a drastic effect on a girl. But it's entirely voluntary - there is documentation to prove it - and she's recently signed on the dotted line for another eighteen month stint, so life there can't be all that bad, can it.
...although I guess at an early stage (pluss, I like to think locked away somewhere with some other young ladies) Yep! Some more stuff inspiered by that wondreful Lady2Maid Blogspot tale: 'The Education and Rehabilitation of Miss Caroline...
The AI does do a nice school uniform when it puts its mind to it but it's a shame I can rarely get the same uniform twice
...albeit with a bit of help from the ol' Toyntanen imagination aided and abbeted by my ol' mate: The Gimp! So - to cut a long story short - I'd written some prompts (instructions to the AI art image generator) involving hypnotic patterns and devices (still persuing the ol' MC thread
I've become fond of over the years) and late teen girls in schol uniforms in various situations, such as private secure psychiatric instituitions and various dubious - and likely corrupt - 'care' homes and so on....and all of a sudden, amongst the dross, weird stuff involving multiple limbs and so on and total failiors out pops this charming little study. I mean, apart for the fact you can just make out the white 'V' of her knickers under the tiny skirt, it's an absolutly innoculous scene...But what of all those hamburgers??? hmmmm???? What, well...MIGHT be going on??? I mean to say: She doesn't seem the sort to be wanting to stuff her face with all that grub! but perhaps...just PERHAPS...she has no, or very little, choice in the matter? Well, that's just how the ol' Toyntanen grey cells seem to work.
Usualy when the AI throws up something NOT like a photographic image and looking instead as if drawn or painted I pretty much bin it straight away, but not so in this case - there was just something...I dunno...just sort of...charming about it. Ideal starting fodder for to work on using my favorite photo manip package, namely the afformention programe The Gimp! The storyline, to me at least, was obvious. To be honest I fondly imagined I'd put something together around this as a starting point in a few hours, an evening at worst. It ended up sort of evolving through very many itterations and the result you see here is the result of around two and a half days near continuous work as each idea I managed to succesfully realsise led to the next idea and challange.
Please DO let me know what you think..whether positive or negative (come on, folks, I can take it!...Probably!)
Before I go...Here is another spurious image the AI spewed out - this one only today, just a few hours ago - and once again, having very little to do with the type and subject matter of the images I was asking for. Actualy, I'd wager that if I tried actualy prompting for an image such as this the AI would flag up a 'safety issue' ans ask me to modify the prompt accordingly. I might not have been deliberatly trying for this image but now that it's here, let's not waste it!
Two questions...What is going through your mind right now as you look at it? And what would you add in order to embelish it - or would you just leave well alone? (Or do you just instantly hate it (some will, I know) becasuse - perhaps - it implies mental health issues?)
And it's quite remarkablewhat has been achieved with the girls. This one had ambitions to become a proffesional dancer and the girl next to her had been on the verge of a career as a fashion model...
Hi folks Back on the 15th of March I posted up a piece I called 'Happy Birthday Polly' (click to read or scroll down the page) which in one way or another lead to a minor discussion (see the appended comments) as to how one might deal with the overweight teenager or - on the other hand - the over-vain self-conscious opinionated stick insect forever preening in the mirror and full of overblown aspirations and ambitions. In connection with the latter 'Orage' wrote "How to deal with the perfectly slim young thing...": quite simple since you've already dealt with that in 'Institutionalised 2': by giving her a girlish uniform, a fattening diet and having her hair messily trimmed." well to be honest this was an aspect that I only touched upon in that volume - and of course as I suggested there, under the right circumstances, and particularly within an institutional setting, it would be quite possible to manipulate the calorific content of the girl's meals to match one's aim without her being unduly alerted (other than for the effects of course, but they would take time to develop and might be camouflaged to some degree). 
In fact manipulating the nutritional content of meals and keeping all else the same, the appearance, the consistency etc, is quite common in the annals of dietetic research literature. This is all well and good up to a point but eventually the fact remains that the young lady concerned would likely spot the changes being wrought and tend to try to counteract them - perhaps even subconsciously, resulting in reduced appetite. She might choose to eat more or less as appropriate and there is a limit it to how far one can increase or decrease the calorific content of a meal without it becoming something very strange indeed and the intervention being laid bare. 
What if our young lady could be manipulated psychologically in some way to change her behaviour? Perhaps subtly, being encouraged step-by-step along the way with a loving arm around her shoulders so to speak. Food treats used as a form of reinforcement in behaviour modification might under the right circumstances and with the right encouragement become a source of comfort, perhaps to such a degree that the obsessively dieting would be catwalk model or dancer in effect becomes a compulsive eater. Driven by a subconscious compulsion that she can't possibly comprehend a point might be reached when, despite her burgeoning figure that stares back at her from the mirror, she no longer sees the point in all those punishing exercise routines she used to put herself through - and yet the choice to give up would almost seem as if her own. In that way I imagine her gradually slipping further and further under her carer's power. Mind you, one would want to control all those excess pounds and a girdle would seem the way forward (see top of
page) - fine and ideal under a nylon work dress (see right) and apron if set to work scrubbing the floor, but I wonder what would work under a school uniform. And one would definitely want to 'apply the brakes' once she'd reach one's ideal, but that in itself opens up yet more avenues for discipline.
Dieting and exercise had been her life - but her stepmother never approved of a career in fashion cat-walk modeling in any case!
.....
A straight-jacket and a box of chocs! An intriguing little pic I stumbled upon recently that reminded me of a certain section of the new volume that I have part-written - albeit in a fragmented form – and that I have neglected of late. Note to self: Get it finished!!!
The point is; the whole thing - the above text and pic – makes for a nice, if a little diffuse, allegory for the behavior of Lulu (the self-publishing bunch through whom my books are currently distributed). For a long while Lulu charged a flat per download for electronic PDF versions of books. The difference between that fee and the price charged to readers – which the author gets to choose – is the amount the writer receives as a royalty or payment. Fine! It was fine as far as I was concerned even when they upped that fee by around ninety – odd percent a while back. All seemed to have been stable in terms of charges for quite some time; i was happy with my share and did not want to charge my readers any more than absolutely necessary to make it worth my while (which strictly speaking, from a purely economic standpoint it isn't) – which is why I always encourage folk to purchase electronic downloads. As you may or may not know, I have been tweaking volume 2 for some time in preparation for assigning it an ISBN so as to distribute it via Amazon, Waterstones and the like and also to make it available to the Google Book-Search engine. To these ends, to make it more visible to the various search engines (volume 1 is near-on invisible to Amazon's search engine, which by default searches book titles for entered key-words) I have gone in for a little bit of 'search engine optimization' by way of including a rich mix of key words in sentence form (so Google doesn't recognize it as what it is – a list of key words) at the top of each chapter heading page. Having completed that task I had then to replace the existing file on Lulu's site – and all went well on that front. But lo and behold! It now turns out the whole pricing structure has changed (if I had known beforehand I wouldn't have bothered). Not content with collecting their flat fee (which is still levied), the folk at Lulu now want to take a proportion of the 'profit' on top of that fee (a proportion, mind you i.e a percentage!). The long-shot of all this is; in order to receive the same amount per download as before (not a fortune - and neither is there the volume of sales through that channel to offset that fact) I have been forced to increase the price. Not merely by the shortfall though – because Lulu takes a percentage of the profit, their chunk goes up along with any increase one instigates. The long and short of this latter point is that the price-hike is substantial – I now have to price INSTITUTIONALISED volume 2 at £4.95 per download or £9.95 per print copy. This goes against all my principles and further more compromises the original intentions I had when I set out writing (largely for my own amusement but also to fill a hole in the genre). INSTITUTIONALISED volume 1 remains the same price (and hopefully always will) and in addition I hope to have some exciting news regarding volume 1 next time (I'd hoped to have space to tell you this time, but I got side-tracked).
Click here to read part 1 (if you haven’t already) Something to keep you going while I get on with my proof reading and amending of INSTITUTIONALISED volume 2 (I had to go back to research some stuff about fabrics today, but the result was some fascinating revisions made to a certain young lady's uniform that I'm afraid can only have made it more irksome for her - we try to be kind, but its all good discipline and it is for her own good after all).
Dietary Discipline, Harassment Therapy & Sexual Reorientation – A Reader’s Account Revisited (Part 3 – Walking Down the Aisle…Again and Again and Again)
The nurses would belittle us and tell the other members of the ward how perverted we were and that God hates us and that we would be going to hell. They would make us stand on a table and recite nursery rhymes. Or makes us recite a prayer aloud for hours on end - often all day, without any break for lunch. Other times we would have to make public confessions about why we were there - our lesbianism and what that meant - and that our parents had disowned us. I had to make stuff up and it was still horrible humiliating - even though it was mostly lies. These 'confessions' usually had to be made at Sister's weekly 'gatherings' where she held up the undergarments of any girls who had failed to meet the required standards of hygiene - and it was on those occasions when even the drooling girls would receive their shares of strokes if they were deemed slovenly - or otherwise failed to meet the standards expected of them.
And there were times that we were dressed up in some costume designed to humiliate us. Not that it was always the costume that was inherently humiliating - it was the circumstances. Had it been a dress-up party, or even a regular party, it might have been ok - but being dressed up unwillingly for the sole purpose of humiliating us and amusing the nurses and other patients made me want to crawl away and die. Often it was just a party dress - albeit one better suited to a seven-year old - but I remember that one time I was dressed as a bride - not in some quick dress-up kind of way - but in a properly fitted wedding dress and veil. I was made to do circuits around the dayroom all day as the nurses told everybody who would listen that this was as close as I would come to being a bride.“Nobody wore any clothes from home. The hospital seemed o have a plentiful supply of clothing that was made on the premises and they strove for a certain degree of uniformity - but you have to bear in mind that for most of the time we 'sexual deviants' were part of a larger teenage ward that had all types of patients - whether mentally retarded, catatonic, psychotic etc. and it would have been difficult to have us all look uniform.
They didn't trust the sexual deviants - they expected us to molest anybody we could get out hands on - whether it was each other, the 'normal' patients, or even ourselves. So we weren't allowed to socialize in the dayroom or move about without some form of restraint - usually what they called jackets, but weren't much like some of straitjackets I have seen elsewhere. There were a lot of variations because they were made for each person in the hospital's brace shop and the nurses could ask for whatever design variations they thought would be helpful. But mostly the arms were laced to our sides unlike the Houdini style jackets that have the arms in front. Many of the other patients were allowed to move about and use their arms so long as they didn't cause any problems. So you would have a number of patients with full use of their arms and then others, apparently armless, moving around the dayroom, looking quite un-uniform. But they did make some attempt to have us properly and modestly attired - perhaps with an added emphasis on modesty given the presence of potential molesters in their midst. Those unrestrained generally wore a mid-calf mid-grey cotton dress, belted at the waist and with slightly puffed sleeves at the shoulder, a white detachable peter-pan collar, white detachable cuffs, and a plain white pinafore. It was neat enough, being tailored to fit each patient, but looked a little incongruous on some of the obviously retarded patients. I take that back - it looked a little incongruous on everybody - but like anything else you get used to it and before long it begins to look normal.
Those of us who were wearing jackets wore 'slips' over them - sleeveless tubes made from the same mid-grey cotton as the dresses. They had the same peter-pan collars and the pinafores were replaced with tabards. There were no belts since we essentially had no waists to speak of.
And then there were a lot of variations. For instance I saw some girls wearing the 'arms crossed in front' style of jacket who were wearing their normal dresses over them - the jacket arms inside the arms of the dress. The jackets were a lot tighter than I have seen elsewhere - presumably because they were custom fitted in the brace shop - either from scratch or modified from an old, often greasy, one. This tightness, especially in the sleeves when they were the 'arms-in-front' kind allowed them to be worn under our dresses instead of over them. So, as you can see, uniformity, if it was a goal, was only partially achieved.
I think I mentioned that I managed to bite one of the nurses when I was being admitted and that turned out to be a big mistake, because throughout my stay the nurse continued to make sure that I 'paid-for-it'. And I 'paid-for-it' in any number of ways. One of them was having to wear a hessian slip under all my clothes and restraints. It was as itchy as any hairshirt must have been and they were always looking for. proof that I must be finding ways to masturbate - and that was in spite of the considerable measures that they always took to ensure that we didn't masturbate. That meant a trip to the brace shop for a very elaborate (and uncomfortable) orthopaedic brace to better ensure my future good behaviour.
I could never really understand why we wore pinafores and tabards. I suppose it was a hold-over from a prior era when such things were more fashionable - maybe when the building first opened - but by the early sixties they were something of an anachronism for anybody but a little girl - an age we teenagers were trying to dissociate ourselves from. They must have been a nightmare for the laundry and we were always getting in trouble for smudging them. But they also served the purpose of identifying us. Every girl on the ward had her number printed in large numerals on both the front and the rear of her pinafore or tabard and the deviants also had 'DEVIANT' printed in large capital letters beneath the numbers, letting everybody know to give them a wide berth - just in case they missed our stubbly heads.”
“I'm not sure how long the average stay might have been. I was there for three years - when the program was phased out - and I don't think that I was unusual. I was lucky to be released rather than remaining a patient in one form or another. The problem was that the results of the program and my own treatment were considered inconclusive and the hospital was reluctant to discharge me, still a possible danger to society, only a teenager and with nowhere particular to go.
Dietary Control and Enforced Weight Gain?
“Still on the subject of diets: was there any attempt to weight control? Perhaps weight loss or even enforced weight gain (something that occurs in volume 2 of my book)?”
“I should apologize for not having read your book yet and for not having read very much of your blog. It is very high on my list of things I must do, but things have been very hectic ever since I found your blog - and writing this letter hasn't helped! As for weight control, I'm not quite sure. I do remember overhearing a conversation between two nurses that were discussing what to do about a particular patient. She was extraordinarily beautiful and I think she had been admitted because it was feared she would become promiscuous because she had a number of older boys pestering her. Anyway, the nurses were talking about what might be done and the question of fattening her up or making her too skinny to still be attractive was discussed - but I'm not quite sure what the outcome was. Somehow I think she may have been moved off our ward.
“I'm not sure if this counts, but I do remember that we were often made to wear the braces, and other devices that were made for us in the brace shop, long after they were comfortable. At our age many of us periodically grew quite rapidly. I don't think it was a cost saving measure because most of the people that worked in the brace shop, and certainly almost everybody who worked in attached sewing shop, were patients, and I assume they had to work for nothing. Besides, they showed absolutely no reluctance to take us down anytime they wanted to get us a more 'difficult' brace or jacket or make a modification to our existing brace. So I'm inclined to think that our wearing of braces that we had outgrown was just one more little way in which they needled us. Incidentally I was the recipient of an elaborate brace within a few days of admittance - ostensibly to cure my stooping. Nobody had mentioned it before and I suspect that the nurse I bit was behind it. Of course after a week or so it didn't seem so bad - but it made moving and bending much more difficult - and in that respect I was always conscious of it.”...to be continued...
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