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Title details for Madness by Antonia Hylton - Available

Madness

Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

by Antonia Hylton
Antonia Hylton
Audiobook
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2 of 2 copies available
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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    January 23, 2024

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781668635407
      • File size: 318186 KB
      • Duration: 11:02:53

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Library Journal

      September 1, 2023

      From Peabody- and Emmy Award--winning NBC journalist Hylton, Madness relates the history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums in the United States with surviving records, built in 1911 Maryland by enchained Black men who were then incarcerated there. Prepub Alert.

      Copyright 2023 Library Journal

      Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Library Journal

      December 1, 2023

      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 expos� 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

      Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Kirkus

      December 15, 2023
      A thoroughgoing, often shocking expos� 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(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Antonia Hylton does a bang-up job narrating her own work, a searing account of Crownsville Hospital, a segregated mental institution in Maryland that served as a dumping ground for any Black person whom white authorities found inconvenient. Crownsville was, for much of its 93-year history, not a place of healing, despite the best efforts of some staff members. Instead, it was a place of misery and abuse. Emotion comes through in Hylton's performance, keeping the listener engaged without overwhelming the content. Her pacing and tone are excellent, which is no surprise--her day job as a TV reporter depends a great deal on her voice and ability to tell a story. Those assets make this audiobook even stronger. G.S. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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