Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck,
Speaker 1: and we've got Jerry all wrapped up, so that means
Speaker 1: this is an episode of short Stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. You know, I don't know why I
Speaker 2: thought of this. I may have, I don't know. Maybe
Speaker 2: I was listening to Quiet Ride or something because the
Speaker 2: idea of straight jackets popped into my head and I
Speaker 2: was just wondering. I was like, you know, you see
Speaker 2: you still see that stuff in TV and movies. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but I was like, is that still a thing? And
Speaker 2: it turns out not so much.
Speaker 1: No, not so much. How Stuff Works did an article
Speaker 1: recently on straight jackets, and I also saw a really
Speaker 1: good article on a site called history Hit, which I
Speaker 1: hadn't heard before, but a guy named Kyle Hoachstro wrote
Speaker 1: about him and it's.
Speaker 2: Part of this came from How Stuff Works. A little
Speaker 2: bit of it.
Speaker 1: Okay, cool, Yeah, I thought I recognized that. So street
Speaker 1: jackets came around in the Georgian period, way more recently
Speaker 1: than I thought. Some people say about seventeen seven around them,
Speaker 1: and they're exactly what we think of them today, which
Speaker 1: is they were used to prevent people with severe mental
Speaker 1: illness from harming themselves and others by preventing them from
Speaker 1: moving their arms. They could still throw their torso at you,
Speaker 1: but they couldn't like strangle you or smack you, or
Speaker 1: punch you or choke you or anything like that, because
Speaker 1: their arms were tied around their back through these overly
Speaker 1: long sleeves that were attached to a jacket. Hence the
Speaker 1: straight jacket, very very tightly. That's where the word straight
Speaker 1: comes from.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly, straight as in a t.
Speaker 1: Yes, straight laced, meaning tightly drawn or tight fitting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, not straight as in straight and narrow.
Speaker 1: No, and not straights like Ludacris's old restaurant in Atlanta.
Speaker 2: I didn't know he had one.
Speaker 1: They had to dessert. It was chocolate soup, which from
Speaker 1: what I could tell, is just water down chocolate.
Speaker 2: You know the Falcons. I have season tickets and they
Speaker 2: have different themes usually, and one week it was the
Speaker 2: history of hip hop, and so there was all kinds
Speaker 2: of people that came out and sang during the breaks
Speaker 2: and stuff timeouts, and at one point, Ludicrous came down
Speaker 2: from the ceiling of Mercedes Ben's dome nice like strapped
Speaker 2: into a thing a straight jacket with like a GoPro
Speaker 2: on a selfie stick.
Speaker 1: That's awesome.
Speaker 2: Man, Like hundreds of feet in the air. It was
Speaker 2: pretty amazing.
Speaker 1: I would have lost my mind with fear head of been.
Speaker 2: We were all pretty delighted. So straight jackets have sort
Speaker 2: of risen and fallen and lockstep with the what they
Speaker 2: used to call, you know, insane asylums. We don't use
Speaker 2: that term anymore, but these asylums really grew over a
Speaker 2: couple of hundred years in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
Speaker 2: and lockstep so did the use of straight jackets. They
Speaker 2: were heavily used for a while, like you said, just
Speaker 2: to keep people from hurting themselves or others. And their
Speaker 2: rationale at the time was sort of like, hey, listen,
Speaker 2: at least you can move around. We're not like chaining
Speaker 2: you to a bed or something like that. Yeah, so
Speaker 2: you can get up and walk around. At least it's
Speaker 2: a little more humane than the alternative. But things started
Speaker 2: to change as things changed in how we looked at
Speaker 2: treating mental illness.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and one of the things there was actually a
Speaker 1: strange turning point where they started to go out around
Speaker 1: the time that King George, the third of England who
Speaker 1: was running the show when the American colonies declared independence
Speaker 1: and fought England for independence and won. By the way
Speaker 1: he was. There was a very famous movie and I
Speaker 1: believe book called The Mandess of King George.
Speaker 2: Great movie.
Speaker 1: I had not seen it, but I did you know
Speaker 1: that he was considered barking mad, as they were to
Speaker 1: put it back in the day he had. They're not
Speaker 1: quite sure what he had. They think possibly even had
Speaker 1: a metabolic disorder called porphyria, and wasn't mentally ill at all,
Speaker 1: but these were just symptoms of porfyria. He could have
Speaker 1: also had severe mental illness, but he was confined in
Speaker 1: a straight jacket, very famously by his doctor, Francis Willis.
Speaker 1: Francis Willis also seemingly cured George the Third two and
Speaker 1: very publicly so. And so King George the Third represented
Speaker 1: the end of straight jackets because he also represented the
Speaker 1: beginning of the concept, at least in England and the Colonies,
Speaker 1: that mental illness could in fact be cured, and that
Speaker 1: created a revolution in how we treated the mentally ill.
Speaker 1: From that point on, it all pivoted in the In
Speaker 1: One King.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you should totally see that movie. It's great, okay,
Speaker 2: like Capital g.
Speaker 1: Grade, who's a David Keith.
Speaker 2: No, Nigel Hawthorne is King George. And you think David
Speaker 2: ian Holme is Doctor Francis Helen Myrens in it. It's
Speaker 2: it's really really.
Speaker 1: Good, Okay, I'll check it out.
Speaker 2: So in the nineteen tents, of course, is when we
Speaker 2: saw the straight jacket worn by Houdini as a way
Speaker 2: to do a stunt in full view of the audience,
Speaker 2: rather than holding curtain up. But his brother, actually, Theodore Harden,
Speaker 2: used the straight jacket before Houdini, evidently, and I think
Speaker 2: Houdini might have ganked that from his bro.
Speaker 1: Yeah. You know, we did a whole episode on Houdini.
Speaker 2: It was a good, good one.
Speaker 1: It was speaking of good ones. I say we take
Speaker 1: a message break, let's do it.
Speaker 3: Well, now we're on the road, driving in your truck.
Speaker 3: I want to learn a thing or two from Josh,
Speaker 3: PM Chuck.
Speaker 1: It's stuff you should know.
Speaker 3: Should all right, Final Josh and shock shot.
Speaker 2: So these days, if you're not watching movies or television
Speaker 2: where you still see tons of straight jackets, you're probably
Speaker 2: not going to see them use much at all. They
Speaker 2: are pretty outdated. Now we have. We have all kinds
Speaker 2: of different things, from better treatments, better medication, better techniques,
Speaker 2: more staff. The idea of just sort of the idea
Speaker 2: of restricting someone's liberties by physically restraining them like that
Speaker 2: is just sort of an outdated way to look at stuff.
Speaker 2: They can also be deadly. I think there was a
Speaker 2: case in eighteen twenty nine at Lincoln Asylum where someone
Speaker 2: actually strangled themselves with their straight jacket.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they were strapped to the bed in a street
Speaker 1: jacket and left overnight, and when they returned they had
Speaker 1: strangled themselves or had been strangled by their straight jacket overnight,
Speaker 1: and all the way back in eighteen twenty nine this asylum,
Speaker 1: Lincoln Asylum, banned the use of straight jackets. So even
Speaker 1: as far back as that, within a few decades of
Speaker 1: their invention, they already had a bad name as being dangerous,
Speaker 1: despite being considered a more humane alternative to chaining somebody,
Speaker 1: which it was. You could say, but yeah, like you said,
Speaker 1: we now have different, like different techniques to We do
Speaker 1: have physical restraints still, they're usually like super fuzzy wrist
Speaker 1: and arm restraints, but they use those as a last resort,
Speaker 1: right if a patient. In this is the United States.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure about some of the other countries that
Speaker 1: hear us, but in the United States, if a patient
Speaker 1: is dangerous or presents a clear danger to themselves or
Speaker 1: to other people, you can, against their will, inject them
Speaker 1: with the centative to restrain them. So it's chemical restraints
Speaker 1: or we also have different non confrontational techniques. And I
Speaker 1: look that up because I was curious what that amounts to,
Speaker 1: and it is the most like low hanging fruit that
Speaker 1: apparently works. If a patient is agitated, you get them
Speaker 1: away from whatever is agitating them, and then you ask
Speaker 1: them what's wrong? What can I do to help you?
Speaker 1: What do you need to feel better about things? And
Speaker 1: that this works, he's just take them to a low
Speaker 1: sensory environment and just talk to them like a human being.
Speaker 1: That's that's the new technique now, instead of straight jackets
Speaker 1: or chains.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because I imagine being approached by like three big
Speaker 2: dudes holding up a straight jacket is not going to
Speaker 2: lower the temperature at all.
Speaker 1: And one has a net and one has a trident.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it really is. It really is an
Speaker 2: almost one trope because like these things went out of
Speaker 2: fashion so long ago, but movies and TV just kept
Speaker 2: using that same trope because it just is such a
Speaker 2: signal for what you're to say, what kind of person
Speaker 2: this is, which is a danger.
Speaker 1: I think if there's any through thread to stuff you
Speaker 1: should know, and there are many, but definitely that we've
Speaker 1: been grossly misinformed and misguided by TVs and movies over
Speaker 1: the years. It's definitely a thread of stuff you should know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure, there is a company and I don't
Speaker 2: know if it was this might have been from the
Speaker 2: House of Works article. Sure, but uh, there is a
Speaker 2: company in uh Wanaki, I hope I'm pronouncing that right,
Speaker 2: Wisconsin called Humane Restraint and I read that the first
Speaker 2: twelve times as human Restraint, which I thought was the
Speaker 2: worst funny name for a company that did this. Sure,
Speaker 2: but it's actually a great name because it's Humane Restraint.
Speaker 2: It's a company that makes this stuff. Did you go
Speaker 2: to the website and look around?
Speaker 1: No, but I did look up suicide smocks.
Speaker 2: Well, just peruse Humane Restraint the website at some point,
Speaker 2: because it's just one of those things where you are
Speaker 2: sort of shocked to realize that there are, of course,
Speaker 2: a company makes this stuff. This company makes all the
Speaker 2: bed restraints. They make this safe furniture that you can't
Speaker 2: like hurt yourself on gum me furniture. They make the
Speaker 2: suicide smocks, which is you can't like roll them up
Speaker 2: like to hang yourself or tear pieces off or whatever.
Speaker 1: No, it's a dress made out as a gown made
Speaker 1: out of a moving blanket.
Speaker 2: No, I know, but the the whole point is you
Speaker 2: can't roll it up and use it as a noose, yeah,
Speaker 2: or tear it.
Speaker 1: No, I know, it makes total sense. But it's made
Speaker 1: out of moving blanket material.
Speaker 2: Yes, exactly for sure. And the company that makes these
Speaker 2: make less than one hundred straight jackets a year. They're
Speaker 2: called Humane jackets on the website. And if you were
Speaker 2: a hazard to guess how much they cost, what would
Speaker 2: you it would be your guess? Nice leather strapping, Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: it looks top of the line stuff canvas of.
Speaker 1: Course, seventeen hundred dollars, drew.
Speaker 2: My friend. You can get a humane jacket for two
Speaker 2: hundred and twenty five bucks. What, Yeah, it was much
Speaker 2: cheaper than I thought.
Speaker 1: Wow, that's probably plether then it.
Speaker 2: May be, but they had it's just an interesting website
Speaker 2: to think that. Wow, there's a company that just makes
Speaker 2: this stuff, but like a what a market to corner.
Speaker 2: I think the interesting thing is is they interviewed someone
Speaker 2: from there and they were like, hospitals aren't buying these
Speaker 2: anymore at all. Obviously, we sell maybe one hundred of
Speaker 2: them a year, and one hundred percent of them are
Speaker 2: to jails and prisons.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the depressing fact of this podcast totally. In
Speaker 1: twenty fourteen, a group called Treatment Advocacy Center said that
Speaker 1: pointed out that jails, How's jails and prisons house ten
Speaker 1: times more seriously ment a little people than state psychiatric
Speaker 1: hospitals too. And the reason why that's a little bit
Speaker 1: of a three card Monty move right there, because there
Speaker 1: are no state psychiatric hospitals anymore because of Ronald Reagan.
Speaker 2: And of course the reason they're also using straight jackets
Speaker 2: is because they don't they're not hospitals and they don't
Speaker 2: have to play by the same rules of humane treatment,
Speaker 2: so they could. You could still be in a prison
Speaker 2: and if you're a danger they demio a threat or whatever,
Speaker 2: they can put you in a straight jacket.
Speaker 1: So, Chuck, I'm a rocker and I really loved your
Speaker 1: Quiet Riot reference who else has worn straight jackets in
Speaker 1: the music industry over the years.
Speaker 2: Well, my friend you and I would saw Alice Cooper
Speaker 2: in concert together in person, so we know Alice Cooper does.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks to an invitation from Hurricane Nieder herself.
Speaker 2: That's right. Who else?
Speaker 1: Johnny Rotten very famously wore one in the Save the Queen, God,
Speaker 1: Save the Queen video the sex Pistols.
Speaker 2: Yeah, quite right, that quite right. Wouldn't even in that
Speaker 2: article that I found that mentioned these others?
Speaker 1: No, but they just right there on the cover. You
Speaker 1: did some extra, excellent, extra research. You got anything else?
Speaker 2: I got nothing else?
Speaker 1: Well, then street Check.
Speaker 2: It's his apps.
Speaker 1: Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
Speaker 1: The iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
Speaker 1: your favorite shows.