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Why is the straitjacket still the most recognisable popular symbol of ‘madness’, when it’s no longer used in mental health settings?

Read about the varied depictions of the straitjacket in popular culture—from Houdini’s escapes to anti-psychiatry films—and what these tell us about shifting perceptions of psychiatry and society. 

The straitjacket and the asylum

The straitjacket is the paradigmatic symbol of ‘madness’. From The Simpsons to Eminem’s music videos, this evocative object continues to resonate across popular culture, despite its historical association with the brutal treatments of the 19th-century asylum. From its invention, however, the professional and public perception of the straitjacket has been complex.

The straitjacket, or strait waistcoat, was invented in France in around 1770. It is a garment with extremely long sleeves, crossed over the chest and tied or buckled at the back, and was traditionally made from canvas or leather. Though we might now consider it inhumane, it was originally intended to protect inmates from harm while allowing some degree of mobility compared to earlier methods of restraint. It was used widely as both a restraint and treatment in asylums and hospitals around the world in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Throughout this period, ‘non-restraint’ reformers and many psychiatric professionals campaigned for a more ‘moral treatment’ of mental illness that did not involve the use of straitjackets or other physical restraints. Straitjackets were used less frequently from the 1960s, in part due to the spread of the ‘anti-psychiatry’ agenda into popular culture, including through some of the films discussed in this story. But before that, the straitjacket was exploited as a spectacular prop in death-defying publicity stunts.

Houdini and the straitjacket

In the early 1910s, the straitjacket became known in popular culture through escapology. The straitjacket stunt is usually attributed to the great escape artist Harry Houdini, but his younger brother, Theodore Hardeen, was the first magician to conceive escaping from a straitjacket in full view of the audience, rather than behind a curtain. 

Houdini took the stunt to spectacular levels, however, including escaping from one while suspended from a crane above Manhattan in front of a crowd of thousands.

The popular stunt also featured in his first feature-length Hollywood film, The Grim Game (1919), and was the focus of the film’s promotion. The film was considered lost but was rediscovered and restored in 2014.

Copy of a European strait jacket, c.1930

Horror cinema and the straitjacket

Around the same time, the straitjacket was being adopted as a lurid expression of madness—or alternately irrational authority—in horror films, most famously in Robert Wiene’s silent horror The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), the quintessential work of German expressionist cinema.

In the film, protagonist Francis reveals a murderous fairground hypnotist to be the director of an insane asylum. In a dramatic scene, asylum director Caligari is confronted by his own doctors, who wrestle him into a straitjacket and confine him in a cell. 

However, a disputed framing story (allegedly imposed on the filmmakers by the studio) reveals that the main narrative is actually a delusion of protagonist Francis, who turns out to be an asylum inmate under the care of ‘Dr Caligari’. In a parallel scene, the film concludes with Francis being wrestled into the straitjacket and confined in a cell after attacking the asylum director. The director states that he now understands his patient’s delusions and believes he can cure him, thus restoring the authority of the psychiatric profession.

Canvas straitjacket for restraining adult patients, made in London c.1930–1960, and used at the Frenchay Hospital, Bristol.

The straitjacket, counterculture and anti-psychiatry

Alongside its continued use in horror, the straitjacket became a countercultural symbol in the 1960s. One example is the comedy film Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966), directed by Karel Reisz, one of the pioneers of British New Wave cinema. In the film, working-class artist Morgan Delt (David Warner) undertakes a series of bizarre stunts, attempting to win back his upper-class wife (Vanessa Redgrave) who has just divorced him. In addition to the trauma of divorce, Morgan feels caught between the inherited Communist politics of his parents and the capitalist culture of 1960s London. This prompts Morgan to enact an internal rebellion from both, escaping into fantasy worlds.

Morgan’s anarchic behaviour and frequent flights of fancy prompt a psychiatrist to diagnose ‘specialist mental troubles’ that make him a ‘suitable case for treatment’. Morgan ignores the psychiatric advice, and amps up the surreal attempts to win back his wife from her new fiancée. After gate-crashing and sabotaging their wedding dressed as a gorilla, he is washed up on Battersea dock. Still wearing the gorilla outfit, his fantasies turn nightmarish as he imagines himself hoisted above London in a straitjacket and lowered down to face a firing squad made up of friends, family and Russian revolutionaries. 

This descent (or escape) into ‘madness’ sees Morgan admitted to a mental hospital in the film’s finale. The image of him hoisted aloft in the straitjacket was used heavily in the film’s promotion, and not only symbolises psychiatry and society’s view of him as ‘mad’, but also evokes the spectacle and liberatory potential of Houdini’s escapes. The film should be understood in the context of the anti-psychiatry movement, which challenged coercive practices of modern psychiatry such as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) as well as questioning the very idea of ‘madness’. 

Anti-psychiatry is associated with key radical psychiatrists, most famously R.D. Laing, who inspired Morgan! writer David Mercer and with whom he collaborated on his later screenplays for In Two Minds (1967) and Family Life (1971). These films staged authentic depictions of ECT treatment filmed on location at real NHS hospitals, but also represented alterative therapeutic communities where psychotherapy and art therapy allowed individuals to express rather than repress their differences. The experimental ward in Family Life was based on ‘Villa 21’, a short-lived therapeutic community set up by David Cooper—the doctor who coined the term ‘anti-psychiatry’—in the 1960s at Shenley Hospital, Hertfordshire.

The straitjacket was a potent metaphor for anti-psychiatry. Laing argued in 1964 that even ‘in the best places, where straitjackets are abolished’, these are often replaced by more subtle forms of internal restraint and control ‘inside the patient’ designated as ‘mad’. As Laing explained, this normalising adjustment was enacted through new antipsychotic drugs such as Largactil, referred to by the aligned anti-psychiatry and counterculture movements as ‘chemical straitjackets’. The (mis)use of straitjackets also featured prominently in U.S. anti-psychiatry films, most famously Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoos’ Nest (1975). 

50mg tablets of chlorpromazine hydrochloride (Largactil), an antipsychotic drug that treats disorders such as schizophrenia and acute psychotic states, 1970–1985.

The straitjacket as punk aesthetic

The use of the straitjacket as a countercultural or subcultural symbol grew in the 1970s. The ‘Godfather of Shock Rock’ Alice Cooper wore a straitjacket onstage, evoking its theatrical use by Houdini as much as its psychiatric connotations. It was then adopted by punk culture as a visual metaphor for the societal restraints and controls that punk sought to make visible and escape. The Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten (real name John Lydon) wore a straitjacket in an early publicity photo in 1976. Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren adapted the straitjacket as a punk fashion item, which was worn by the band and sold in their shop, SEX. Lydon wore the iconic ‘Destroy’ straitjacket shirt in the band’s infamous ‘God Save the Queen’ video in 1977.  

More recently, hip hop artists such as Tupac and Eminem have taken up the straitjacket as a symbol of disaffection, including  Lil Wayne’s 2014 music video for ‘Krazy’, which was inspired by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. 

Charged by these histories of restraint, escape and rebellion, the straitjacket continues to resonate as a complex and contested signifier of—and challenge to—the idea of ‘madness’. 

Find out more

Online

Tim Snelson, ‘From in Two Minds to MIND: the Circulation of “Anti-Psychiatry” in British Film and Television in the Long-1960s’, History of Human Sciences, 34:5, 2001

Books

Sarah Chaney ‘Psychiatry's Material Culture: The Symbolic Power of the Straitjacket’ in Chris Millard and Jennifer Wallis (eds), Sources in the History of Psychiatry, from 1800 to the Present, 2022

Colin Gardner, ‘Gorilla war: Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment’ in Karel Reisz, 2019

Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, 1979/1988 

R. D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness, 1965 (1960)

Matthew Solomon, Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century, 2010

This story was created by Demons of the Mind, an AHRC-funded project exploring the interactions of the ‘psy’ sciences (psychiatry, psychoanalysis and psychology) and cinema in the long 1960s. 

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