INSTITUTIONALISED

Two young women - each coincidently having an inheritance at stake and a grasping, manipulative stepmother holding the purse-strings - have been talked, cajoled and manipulated into joining a privately financed, residential medical research project. Initially signing up for 3 months, isolated within a secure hospital psychiatric wing in a world of petty rules, straightjackets, bedpans, plastic knickers, diapers, restrictive school uniforms and drab prison dresses, each has now served that term several times over; one bristling under a strict boarding-school regime, the other under prison discipline. Overseen by strict nurses, a stern, cane wielding hospital matron & a female psychiatrist, manipulating her young charges by the deliberate induction of phobias, each has been browbeaten into extending her stay. Elsewhere a girl awakens, ostensibly following a car crash - by why is she restrained behind bars on a locked ward Why does she recall the sting of the tawse, not the twisting of metal