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Résumé
Résumé
In the tradition of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks , a page-turning 93-year history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the nation's last segregated asylums, told by an award-winning journalist on her decade-long search for sanity in America's mental healthcare system.
On a cold day in March of 1911, officials marched twelve Black men into the heart of a forest in Maryland. Under the supervision of a doctor, the men were forced to clear the land, pour cement, lay bricks, and harvest tobacco. When construction finished, they became the first twelve patients of the state's Hospital for the Negro Insane. For centuries, Black patients have been absent from our history books. Madness transports readers behind the brick walls of a Jim Crow asylum.
In Madness , Peabody and Emmy award-winning journalist Antonia Hylton tells the 93-year-old history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. She blends the intimate tales of patients and employees whose lives were shaped by Crownsville with a decade-worth of investigative research and archival documents. Madness chronicles the stories of Black families whose mental health suffered as they tried, and sometimes failed, to find safety and dignity. Hylton also grapples with her own family's experiences with mental illness, and the secrecy and shame that it reproduced for generations.
As Crownsville Hospital grew from an antebellum-style work camp to a tiny city sitting on 1,500 acres, the institution became a microcosm of America's evolving battles over slavery, racial integration, and civil rights. During its peak years, the hospital's wards were overflowing with almost 2,700 patients. By the end of the 20th-century, the asylum faded from view as prisons and jails became America's new focus.
In Madness, Hylton traces the legacy of slavery to the treatment of Black people's bodies and minds in our current mental healthcare system. It is a captivating and heartbreaking meditation on how America decides who is sick or criminal, and who is worthy of our care or irredeemable.
Critiques (4)
Critique du Guardian
At the beginning of this heartfelt, deeply researched inquiry into the history of mental illness in America's Black population, journalist Antonia Hylton describes a regular meeting with a close relative in a park in Massachusetts. The relative - who does not want to be identified in the book - is suffering from a very specific paranoia: they believe that white supremacists are hunting them down. The relative has, Hylton writes, "covered up all of their windows with black gaffer tape¿ unplugged all their electronics, convinced they were being watched through every screen". The worst part of it, she suggests, was that her loved one believed that she, as a journalist - a reporter with NBC - was a passive part of the conspiracy; that she should call an editor and tell the story. "And in a way," she writes, "my loved one was right." The terror of lynching has been replaced by a fear of police killings and by the mass imprisonment of young Black men In part, this book is her detailed response to that cry for help. In uncovering a century of neglect and incarceration of the disturbed and disfranchised, Hylton dwells on the reasons why her extended family and the wider Black community have suffered disproportionately with depression and paranoia and schizophrenia. A lot, she argues, can be explained by poverty and injustice, the factors most likely to push a person to psychological breaking point, but there is also that other glaring fact: the entirely rational fear that white supremacists are out to destroy them. The terror of lynching in previous generations, Hylton suggests, has been replaced by a fear of police killings and by the mass imprisonment of young Black men. The rhetoric the far right uses to justify these acts has never changed much. In the years after emancipation, a series of commentators suggested, Black people "immune to insanity" while enslaved were psychologically ill-equipped for liberty. Fast-forward to the present and the nation is set for another election in which those old racist tropes about innate Black self-destruction are fundamental to Donald Trump's campaign. Hylton ends her study with an analysis of the killing of Jordan Neely, a homeless man characterised as 'unhinged' when he was choked to death on the New York subway in May 2023 by former marine Daniel Penny. Photograph: New York Daily News/TNS The thread through Hylton's story is an institution called Crownsville, formerly known as the Hospital for the Negro Insane of Maryland. Crownsville opened in 1911, the hospital itself built by the forced labour of its first "feeble-minded" patients. At its peak in the 1950s, more than 2,700 people were resident in a place that "existed along the spectrum of asylum and jail and warehouse". It finally closed its doors in 2004. Over the course of 10 years of research into Crownsville, Hylton tracked down and interviewed dozens of former patients and employees, and brought a forensic eye to the hospital records that had not been destroyed to conceal decades of evidence of abuse. Her many case histories show how, for years, people were sent to Crownsville for petty theft, or for destitution or illness, and held in close quarters with the criminally insane. As the population of Crownsville grew, so the abuses multiplied. In 1943, an employee at the hospital revealed to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People how patients were forced to eat rotten food and sleep on bare wooden floors. Children shared "wards" with adults, where many of the patients were naked; "hydrotherapy" was employed by nurses in starched white uniforms, in which patients would be placed in very hot or ice cold baths for long periods; electroconvulsive therapy was used, as in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, as much for punishment as treatment. In the 93 years of its operation, 1,700 patients who died at Crownsville were buried in a field in the facility's grounds and nearly 600 other bodies sent to universities for dissection. The makeshift burial ground is the site of a recent memorial and an annual "Say my name" ceremony, where the forgotten dead are acknowledged. As she tells this history, Hylton analyses the psychology of race relations beyond Crownsville's walls, not least in her own family lore, where she shows how "inequality and racial violence [frequently] had the power to cause an unravelling and to sow the seeds of mental illness". There was great-uncle Clarence, who fled his home for Detroit in the middle of the night after threats from the KKK, and who never recovered from the anger and bitterness. Or her father's cousin Maynardwho - having started to hear voices - was fatally shot by a police officer in Mobile, Alabama, in 1976, while a studying for his bar exams, after graduating in law. In among these tragedies are some heroic stories of incremental progress. It took nearly half a century for Crownsville to employ its first minority ethnic member of staff: Vernon Sparks, who in 1948 became the first licensed Black psychologist in the state of Maryland. The beginning of integration, resisted at every turn, saw marginal improvement for the Crownsville patients. The first Black nurse, Gertrude Belt, was the first to wash her patients' hair; her friend Dorothea McCullers, a seamstress, made inmates' clothes; and Marie Gough, now in her 80s, was the first to insist that patients could exercise outside. Those reforms were echoed in asylums across the country. In 1953, the National Mental Health Association invited all hospitals to dismantle and submit any remaining iron chains to be melted down; a symbolic 300lb "mental health bell" was forged from those manacles. Reading of how barbaric experimentation and effective segregation persisted, however, is to recognise the legacy of those regimes in the hopelessly inadequate response to the current epidemic of mental illness, particularly among Black Americans. Hylton ends her impassioned and rigorous study with an analysis of the killing of Jordan Neely, the Black homeless man killed on the Manhattan subway in May 2023 by former marine Daniel Penny. Neely was characterised as "unhinged" and a "vagrant" in the New York Post, his "crime" being to confront passengers with words that echo down the ages in Hylton's history: "I don't have food! I don't have drink! I'm fed up!" He was choked to death by Penny, an assault filmed by several commuters. The same scene, Hylton argues, the "othering" of vulnerable Black people as a way of justifying violent and lethal control, has been played out throughout America's past. "The crises of mental illness, housing insecurity and income inequality bear down on all of us," she concludes. "We can try to construct cities and communities where these embarrassments remain out of view¿ but that is only going to get harder."
Critique de Kirkus
A thoroughgoing, often shocking exposé of segregation in the treatment (or nontreatment) of mental illness. NBC News reporter Hylton documents the history of Crownsville Hospital in Maryland, founded in 1911 as the Hospital for the Negro Insane. Getting to the story was not easy: The archives were incomplete because "the state had destroyed or lost most of the files preceding the year 1960, and others they had allowed to become contaminated with asbestos." Unsurprisingly, the more controversial the past episode, such as the murder of a patient or systematic abuse, the likelier the documents were to have disappeared. Even so, in digging into the archives and seeking out those with firsthand or secondhand memories of the place, the author uncovered profoundly unsettling stories. One concerns an educator who, upon entering Crownsville after a case of typhoid fever had affected his mental health, "was just another inmate." He was also effectively enslaved, and though Maryland was not in the Confederacy, it did permit slavery until 1864. In the Jim Crow era, Crownsville's population swelled, its inmates growing tobacco and food crops under the supervision of white overseers; inside the walls of Crownsville, whites also governed the lives of Black people who were less treated than incarcerated. "Crownsville's founding took vestiges of chattel slavery--from the style of the rolls to the financial recordkeeping format used on plantations--and translated them to a clinical setting," writes Hylton, and the administration of the hospital remained remarkably consistent even after Maryland ordered the desegregation of state mental hospitals in 1962. Meaningfully, Hylton closes by examining the racialized discrepancies in mental health care today as they played out in the New York subway murder of Jordan Neely in 2023. An excellent work of journalism and a strong contribution to the literature of both mental health care and civil rights. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Critique de CHOICE
This narrative might be the premise of a horror film. In 1911, the first building that would become the Maryland Hospital for the Negro Insane was built by twelve Black men who became its first patients. Later renamed Crownsville State Hospital, its patients suffered from decades of overcrowding, underfunding, forced unpaid labor, and abuse. White doctors and poorly trained attendants believed that Black mental health patients should be managed through work and incarceration. Many patients went undiagnosed or had been court-committed to relieve overcrowded jails. At times, archival research, journalism, and personal memoir, this soul-stirring book also documents the many acts of love committed by Black men and women who came to work at Crownsville after the desegregation orders of the 1950s. For example, Gertrude Belt, one of the hospital's first Black attendants, broke protocol when she held patients carefully to bathe them and comb their hair for the first time in decades. White attendants had refused to touch Black patients, except to punish them, and scorned the idea of cleaning hospital facilities, acts that resembled domestic service. This ground-breaking book traces a century of systemic racism, mass incarceration, and views of mental illness. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. --Joel Robert Wendland-Liu, Grand Valley State University
Critique du Library Journal
Peabody- and Emmy-winning journalist Hylton (cohost of the podcast Southlake and Grapevine) documents the history of Crownsville Hospital in Anne Arundel County, MD. The author conducted her own investigation and scanned archival documents for 10 years to deliver this book that shows how the Jim Crow-era mental health facility, deemed a house of horrors, first came to exist after 12 Black men were forced to clear the land, build the asylum, and become its first patients. In its heyday, Crownsville Hospital had nearly 2,700 patients at a time. Hylton writes a scathing exposé on the bigotry that led to the mistreatment of hundreds of Black patients and the attempts to cover it up. Her book is also a call to action to reform the systems that treat people diagnosed with mental illnesses. The author dives deeply into sources that have been lost or held behind bureaucratic red tape to uncover the injustices that occurred at Crownsville Hospital. VERDICT This well-researched title is an important chronicle of the treatment of Black Americans and their mental health during the Jim Crow era. Beyond promoting systemic change, Hylton compels readers to look within to assess how they treat and view the people around them.--Mason Bennett