Rise Of Insanity

Do you know the definition of insanity? Insanity is doing the same thing over, and over, and over again while expecting different results. That can easily be applied with me trying to look for a fun experience with a walking simulator disguised as a horror game. After my less-than-stellar experience with Layers of Fear, I decided to give Rise of Insanity a chance, despite signs that this was going to be yet another weak horror experience loaded with genre clichés. I should have listened to myself, Rise of Insanity is even more boring than Layers of Fear.

Rise of Insanity

Horror games are truly fantastic. Over the past few years, new and exciting experiences have risen to the occasion, attempting to scare each and every one of us. Heavy hitters like Resident Evil 7 and The Evil WIthin have entered the fray. Beyond the bigger games, you have releases like Darkwood and Claire pushing the genre forward. Beyond that, you have a game like Rise of Insanity and it all starts to go downhill.

Torrey and Miller dismiss one by one the series of explanations given by generations of historians and psychiatrists to the effect that there is no compelling evidence to conclude that insanity has been on the increase. First, although they acknowledge that the construction of asylums must have led to some families' "revealing" their insane members by (formally) confining them, this acknowledgment of mental illness, they argue, could not have happened decade after decade after decade: sooner or later, the attics would be empty of hitherto-sequestered [End Page 732] family members. Second, they use nineteenth-century censuses (some of which listed "lunatics" and "idiots") in America and England to show that the Victorian returns in no way approximate the higher rates of mental illness found in the twentieth century. Third, they dismiss the idea that the psychiatric net has been cast wider, arguing that if anything, it was increasingly the more seriously (not the less-affected) mentally ill who found their way into institutions, for mental hospitals became overcrowded in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Fourth, they suggest that the increase in formal institutional accommodation could not be due to workhouses and poorhouses transferring the mad to mental hospitals, since these institutions continued to report insane residents in ever-greater numbers even when asylums were simultaneously bursting at the seams; indeed, they argue that, by the last decades of the nineteenth century, the asylums were desperately sending chronic insane inmates back to the poorhouses, a fact that still did not stabilize the numbers of officially reported insane in either type of institution. The only logical possibility, according to the authors, is to reject the prevailing and convenient historical assumption that the increase in insanity was no more than a statistical artifact or social construct, and accept that there has been an increase in the "real" rate of mental illness in the general population over the last two hundred years.

Extraneous matter in the rectum is that which has become detached either accidentally or deliberately (by mental patients) and retained in the posterior part of the intestine, or that has been introduced from outside via the anus (most often deliberately: rectal masturbation). There are countless different objects introduced in this way, and they indicate an eroticism bordering sometimes on insanity. In many cases it is difficult to extract these objects, which are often large, sometimes brittle, or, more rarely, sharp, and almost always slippery. Because of this the problem of extraction has given rise to many incontestably original procedures with which it is as well to be familiar in order to avoid having to recourse to extraction via the abdomen, a procedure which is not without risks. 041b061a72