Session 9: State Asylums, Mental Illness and Lobotomy
Analyzing Madness, Murder and Memory in Session 9
Session 9 (2001) is a psychological horror movie that invites viewers to reflect on the problematic history of psychiatric institutions, the use (and abuse) of shock therapies, and the relationship between mental health and criminality. The place in which the film is set has a rich history and, thus, is given a huge role for the narrative. Some critics have compared it to The Shining (though, in our amateur opinion, we raised an eyebrow upon reading that comparison).
In our experience, films tend to depict psychosurgery for different reasons. One is the use of the operation as a draconian device to deal with unruly patients (i.e. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’ Nest) or to reform criminals (i.e. A Clockwork Orange). In other cases, like Session 9, these interventions are employed as a torture method; a means of scaring the audience by displaying their disturbing nature.
The Plot (Spoilers Ahead)
A group of five asbestos removal workers - made up of Gordon, the stressed-out boss, his best friend Phil, Mike, Hank and Gordon’s nephew, Jeff - are hired to clear hazardous materials from Danvers State Hospital, an abandoned mental institution. Gordon got the crew the job by promising to complete the work in record time (one week). We found this ludicrous, considering the size of the building and the crew.
Once they begin working at Danvers, they quickly become uncomfortable due to the hospital’s eerie atmosphere. During their first lunch break, they have a conversation about the hospital. Mike said budget cuts were not the only reason Danvers went bankrupt. He tells them about a lawsuit from a former patient’s family. This patient, Patricia Willard, falsely accused her family of sexually abusing her as part of Satanic rituals.
Upon returning to work, Mike finds some patients' files including recorded therapy sessions and becomes enthralled by the case of Marie Hobbs. She suffered from multiple personality disorder1. As the days passed, Mike continued listening to Hobb's sessions, disturbing him as he learned more about her darker personalities. Concurrently, other members of the crew are working in different areas of the hospital. Towards the end of the day, they noticed Hank is missing and assume he abandoned the project.
The following day, Jeff finds Hank behaving erratically. Hank was looking through a window, wearing sunglasses, and listening to music on headphones. Jeff tries calling him, but he is unresponsive. Hank is shown muttering one sentence over and over again. Astute viewers may recall that Mike mentioned one of the side effects of prefrontal lobotomies were black eyes, which were often hidden under sunglasses. The audience later learns that his sunglasses are covering up an ice-pick, still stuck on his eye-socket. Meaning that he had been violently lobotomized.
A few days into the job, Mike listens to Marie Hobb’s ninth session. Marie’s darkest personality, Simon, takes over the session and confesses to pushing the girl into killing her family. He says that he “lives in the weak and wounded”, asserting that whenever he commands them to kill, “they always do.”While Mike is distracted by the tapes, other members of the crew are murdered.
Gordon has been slaying his crewmates. As the movie went on, he became more erratic and aggressive. The audience learns that Gordon had repressed the memory of killing his wife and daughter days before removing asbestos from the hospital. The film suggests that the job, like the situation at home, created conditions where he acted violently.
The Danvers State Hospital
The script writers, Brad Anderson and Stephen Gevedon, claimed they had a location before they had a story. The Danvers State Hospital, opened in 1878, was a real institution located in the city of Danvers, Massachusetts2. Originally, the Hospital sought to treat patients compassionately, but by the mid 20th century it was overcrowded and embraced shock therapies such as lobotomy, and electroshock therapy (De Long, 2018). The hospital was designed to hold about 500 patients; nevertheless, like many mental institutions across the United States, it became severely overcrowded (over 2000 patients) and underfunded in the early 20th century (De Long, 2018)3. The increasing number of patients, some of which seemed incurable and some of which were unmanageable, encouraged doctors to try new approaches to cure them. Many of these treatments seem brutal by today’s standards.
Danvers Hospital, like many others, adopted these shock therapies because they seemed promising. Danvers was among the first ones to fully implement lobotomy in their treatment. The hospital seems to have played an important role in popular culture too. The infamous reputation and eerie atmosphere of the hospital has also allegedly served as an inspiration for HP Lovecraft’s Arkham Asylum, which would later be introduced in DC Comics Batman. In the film, the hospital is an abandoned and totally decrepit building. They filmed at the real place. It is claimed that the producers did not have to bring in many props, as they used what they found in the abandoned hospital. The site was demolished in 2007.
The Use and Abuse of Shock Therapies
While Session 9’s treatment of lobotomy largely reflects a 21st century view, it also provides a somewhat accurate description of the operation and its possible side effects. Lobotomy is not at all central to the plot, and seems to be used as a stylistic device to shock the audience.
At different instances throughout the movie, Mike addresses one of the characters, Jeff, who is portrayed as immature and unintelligent, as a “lobotomy case”, in reference to his lack of common sense and clumsiness. This may refer to lobotomy’s reputation for rendering some patients child-like and dull.
In another scene, Mike grabs Jeff forcibly by the neck, and with a chopstick he was using to eat, pulls it close to Jeff’s eye sockets. Simultaneously, he describes the procedure: “Insert thick metal pipette into the orbital cortex, and enter the soft tissue of the frontal lobe. A few simple smooth up-and-down jerks, to sever the lateral hypothalamus, all resulting in a rapid reduction of stress, for our patient here. Total time elapsed, two minutes"
We doubt that any lobotomy was carried out this quickly, but the description is more or less acceptable. It is also a bit gory and shocking. The disturbing description and use of lobotomy in this film condemn the use of these therapies.
Earlier, we discussed Hank’s disappearance and connected this to how lobotomy had been described. When Jeff finds Hank, Hank is blankly looking out the window. In real life, some lobotomized people did become fully apathetic, and some were left in vegetative state. This may explain why Hank behaves this way. We suspect that this view of lobotomy’s effects represents fairly accurately how contemporary audiences envision the operation, as a mutilating one. Nevertheless, most lobotomized people did not experience side effects as severe.
In the end, Hank is found dead, lying down naked and covered with a plastic sheet. The audience sees the ice-pick stuck deep into his brain, presumably killing him slowly over multiple days. His death could also be due to Gordon returning to finish him off, but neither is clarified.
Mental Illness and Criminality
One of the most intriguing aspects of the movie is its representation and understanding of mental illness and its connection to criminal activity.
The movie draws a parallel between Hobbs and Gordon, suggesting that both characters, and perhaps humans at large, can be made violent through environmental factors. The idea of repressed memories also plays an important role in both characters. For example, the amount of stress that a traumatic experience had on Hobbs, led to the fracturing of her personality into three: the Princess, Billy, and Simon. Similarly, the film suggests that it was Gordon’s overwhelming state of stress that led him to murder his wife and child, to later dissociate completely, repressing those memories. Ultimately, the same repressed trauma provoked him to murder the rest of the crew.
In an interview, Anderson said that the inspiration for the character of Gordon came from a real case. Richard Rosenthal, an insurance agent from Boston, murdered his wife in 1995. He cut her heart out and stuck her remains on a stake in their backyard. He continued living his life normally for a couple of days until he was arrested. Upon questioning, he assured he didn’t remember ever murdering her, and his defense pleaded innocence on account of insanity4. He was sentenced as guilty. Anderson reflected, there is "something awful about the notion of a seemingly normal everyday young family man who leads a banal life and then just cracks.” Anderson said everyone doing a regular job could potentially relate to suffering a mental breakdown (while we appreciate that a job can cause considerable stress, we doubt whether this could justify murdering one’s family) .
Hobbs and Mental Illness
In the film, Hobbs suffered from multiple personality disorder. Through her condition, the director conveys the implicit notion that mental illness is one of the roots of violence. One of her personalities, Simon, is portrayed as the violent one. We are told that Hobbs was scared and her violent outburst was a response to that stress. In the film, Simon embodies the uncontrollable or malevolent violence that can hide in anyone.
Gordon and Mental Illness
At first, Gordon appears like a regular man, desperate for work. He clearly is under a lot of stress and, in an effort to get the job, offers to complete the work in one week rather than three that his colleague mentioned. As the film goes on, he begins to act more strangely.
Gordon is often trying to reach his wife by calling her to apologize. In one scene, he tells Phil he hit her after she spilled some food on him. It is only later that we learn that he killed her and his daughter before taking the job at Danvers. However, when Gordon calls home, he seems to have genuinely forgotten what he did. Also, he seems to be hearing some ethereal voice (similar to Hobb’s Simon).
In both Hobbs and Gordon’s case, the film seems to imply that repressed memories and trauma can manifest as violent outbursts. Moreover, in both cases violence is associated with their respective mental health issues.
False Memories and Satanic Rituals
In the film, Mike argued that Danvers closed because of the compounding effects of budget cuts and a 1984 lawsuit. We found no evidence to corroborate this. Nevertheless, the fact that these accusations and shock therapies are mentioned when discussing Danvers seems to be part of a general critique of mental hospitals and their efforts to cure patients.
Mike told the story of Patricia Willard, who allegedly suffered from repressed memories, which were later revealed to be fabrications. In these memories, she recalled her family donning black robes and sexually abusing her as part of a Satanic ritual. Willard affirmed her family had group orgies, drank the blood of babies, and cooked her aborted fetuses as part of these rituals. The crew was in horror, and then Mike told them this was a case of Satanic Ritual Abuse Syndrome, characterized by patients falsely accusing their families of abusing them as part of a Satanic ritual.
This is a nice reference to false memories and the scandal in the 1990s surrounding allegations of sexual abuse related to Satanic rituals. In 1980, Canadian Psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and his patient Michelle Smith, wrote Michelle Remembers. In this book, they recalled Michelle’s experiences. The book was based on over 600 hours of recorded therapy sessions where Dr. Pazder used hypnosis to help Michelle recover memories. She claimed that, when she was a child, she was sexually abused by her family as part of a Satanic ritual. In the early 1990s Michelle and another woman who made similar claims were invited to one of Oprah's shows.
In the years after Michelle Remebers was published, there were over 12,000 (yes twelve thousand) allegations of sexual abuse related to Satanic rituals. In the US, several people were incarcerated, and later exonerated. For example, Dan and Fran Keller spent 21 years imprisoned before being cleared.
The police investigated Michelle’s case and others, and each time, concluded there was no evidence of sexual abuse related to Satanic ritual. For example, Michelle claimed to have missed 81 days of school, but the school’s attendance record did not reflect said absence. The concern about sexual abuse as part of Satanic ritual went international, and investigations were also done in the Netherlands. These investigations found no indication that this abuse had occurred. The last one was concluded in 2021, in which investigators found no evidence, but reported receiving threats for clearing up cases.
Conclusions
Session 9 provides a unique view of mental illness and its relationship with criminality. This is explored through the characters of Gordon and Marie Hobbs, and their transformations when dealing with mental illness. It also explores the theme of shock therapies and their abuses in the Danvers State Hospital, conveying their crude and disturbing nature. However, this exploration is done superficially and for a shock factor rather than an in depth analysis. Finally, Session 9 makes a brief mention of the Satanic Ritual Abuse Syndrome.
We are reassured that analyzing films does provide an entry point to analyzing society because in this case the connections are clear and explicit. The movie was shot at Danvers, a real hospital that did prescribe shock therapies. The writers claimed to have been inspired by a real story. While these are explicit, we have also argued there are several implicit assumptions. It is the role of the historian to try and work what these are.
Sources
De Long, W. “Danvers State Hospital: The Abandoned Asylum That Inspired ‘Session 9.’” All That’s Interesting, 29 Sept. 2021, https://allthatsinteresting.com/danvers-state-hospital. Accessed 6 Feb. 2025
According to a note on IMDB the patient folder says DID (Disassociative Personality Disorder). However, the patient files would say Multiple Personality Disorder as the term DID was introduced into the DSM in 1994.
Danvers was known as Salem Village until 1752 (yes, that Salem)
Anne Harrington’s Mind Fixers is an excellent primer to explore this history.
Allegedly, the couple had recently suffered a miscarriage and Rosenthal was under a lot of stress, which severely affected his psyche. His defense argued that these events led to him entering a state of insanity. Regardless, the judge found him guilty.