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[hops]

A city in Finland is converting an old mental hospital to be its city hall. Jokes about the city being led by lunatics aside, somehow this made national news. It has very little effect on Finland as a whole (or even the city itself), so why report on it?

Because, "Oooooh~ Spooky city hall~" makes far more interesting and important news than anything else. Except terrorism, news about terrorism is great for ratings.

Ah, actually on ratings. Do TV shows actually have ratings or are they an invention of TV shows?

I think most channels have ratings to know which shows to renew and which to cancel.

[Frumple]

They do have ratings, though the exact method they're evaluated with probably changes from area to area and over time. Know in the U.S. at least a handful of years ago every once in a long while you'd get like this survey thing and I think some kind of box to plug into your TV system that you'd keep track of for something like a week or two, then send back in. Want to say it was a gov't initiative of some sort but I can't really recall. Contributed to that sort of thing one way or another, I think.

Nowadays it's probably easier to just track on the channel's end or somethin. Any case, yeah, producers, channels, etc., totally have heuristics to measure stuff like peak viewership, retention, rate of growth/decline, so on so forth, and at least colloquially/outside the industry they're called ratings. No clue if there's a different term for it among professionals in related fields, though.

[IcyTea31]

Hopefuly we'll be getting all kinds of spoopy stories from inmates telling about how they saw ghosts of crazy people. If there's one thing people love talking about in regards to old insane asylums, its crazy people ghosts, its essentialy a trope now.

I think I was misunderstood when I used the term 'old mental hospital'. The hospital in question started working in 1930 and was only phased out in recent years. It was a modern hospital where people were actually treated so they could return to society, not some bedlam that would torture patients until they die. It's probably not haunted.

[Frumple]

... 60-70 years of modern hospital would have seen some corpses and agonized deaths, too, IT. Probably less torture, but the barrier of entry for poltergeists has never been particularly high.

[Yoink]

And from what I've read/am told, mental hospitals haven't been, erm, "nice" for anywhere near as long as other kinds.

[martinuzz]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnzHtm1jhL4

[TempAcc]

Well, modern ones aren't really so horrible. The one IT mentioned was prob one of those which was actualy focusing on curing people, rather than incarceration and experimentation, as it was common for the bedlam houses of the 18th century and before, since insane people were seen as incurable and as a blemish in society rather than as people that need help.

Regardless, they always had this scary air about them, because its hard to keep things normal when you have a bunch of batshit insane people in the same place. I knew people who worked at a local mental hospital, and boy do they have some fun stories to tell you.
It also happens to be a mental hospital ran by a spiritist charity and funded almost entirely by donations, pretty nice place to visit, actualy, though you never get to see the actual crazies unless you're a relative of a patient.

[Arx]

I can imagine, given some of the jokes my therapist cracked about the questions he was legally required to ask me ('do you have any strongly held beliefs others might find strange?' I had to resist the urge to say something about chocolate biscuits and vegetable soup there).

[Frumple]

They're not so horrible, exactly, but they can still get pretty damn rough. Not for the sort of messed up reasons they used to (generally), but just because it can be rather incredibly hard to keep someone very intent on hurting themselves or others from, well, not doing that. Stuff like a particularly panicking/etc. patient ending up naked and clinging to the ceiling is... not unknown. Which may sound amusing until you think for a second and realize that means they probably tore themselves away from an orderly (generally rather fit and trained to keep people restrained) or three, and managed to either climb up the wall or just straight up jump (off of something) and then either dug their fingers through whatever the ceiling's made of or latch themselves onto something up there capable of holding a human's body weight. And it's again not unknown for them to hang there for... a while.

Add on what the mental hiccups involved can do to the patients' psyche and what medication can cause if it's involved... lots of terror, lots of anger, hella' nasty vibes, regardless of how bad the actual treatment is, and that's not even getting into whatever suicides slip through or heart attacks/strokes/etc. end up happening. Places are prime targets for the stuff that's classically attributed to causing ghosties.

[Yoink]

They're not so horrible, exactly, but they can still get pretty damn rough.

Yeah, I never said "THEY'RE AS BAD AS THEY'VE EVER BEEN," I'm just saying that things like EST and lobotomies were still commonplace not so long ago.

...Wait, okay, according to a preliminary Google shock therapy is still used. I think now it's more of a last resort and less "sadistic glee," though. :v
Man, I wonder what receiving it would be like.

Edit: And yes, as Frumple said, some people whose issues force them into such institutions are likely to suffer anywhere, regardless of the abundance or lack of treatment they may receive. Certainly plenty of opportunities for distraught and/or enraged ghosts to be created in a concentrated area.

[IcyTea31]

Eh, point taken. Maybe the real reason they're making it the city hall is to make it so soulless that the ghosts will go away?

[Yoink]

Maybe they're hoping to take advantage of free ghostly labour.

[tonnot98]

Those papers aren't gonna file themselves.

[redwallzyl]

"shock" therapy is actually a proven medically helpful thing now. It's not actually painful. Pretty sure they use anesthesia and relaxants or something as well with it. It's also called something new now because of stigma. Listened to a doctor on NPR who specializes in it.

[TempAcc]

Anyway, if there's ghosties going around in the place I mentioned, I think they'd prob be pleased about it, since its ran by spiritists :U