Join hosts, Earl Miller and Sera Davidow, for a chat with Antonia Hylton, author of Maddness: RACE and INSANITY in a JIM CROW ASYLUM.
From Antonia's website: In Madness, 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 byrownsville 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.
In the tradition of books like The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Hidden Valley Road, Madness explores Crownsville's history and how the legacy of slavery and racist stereotypes ultimately pave the way to the criminalization and stigmatization of Black patients.
ABOUT ANTONIA HYLTON:
