|
?:reviewBody
|
-
On 5 October 2017, a Facebook page called Pictures in History shared a photograph supposedly depicting an American housewife in the 1930s who was committed to a psychiatric facility for the offense of failing to take proper care of her husband: The caption, previously published by a Tumblr user in 2014, claimed that wives could be institutionalized and subjected to shock therapy for failing to smile often enough: The image, mysterious as it is, does not appear to depict a patient in an mental institution. On the contrary, the subject is wearing street clothes, jewelry, styled hair, and makeup. Far from clarifying the mystery, a reverse image search simply led us down a different rabbit hole to a 2014 article recounting a strange urban legend about an attempt to combat a suicide epidemic in 1930s Hungary by creating what was called a smile club. The photograph was attributed (perhaps accurately, perhaps not) to an issue of a Dutch tabloid magazine called Het Levin published in 1937. We found no evidence suggesting that it was of American origin, or that it depicted a patient undergoing smile therapy in a mental institution.
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}