Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

by Antonia Hylton

The specter of racial violence had become so effective that it was hovering over my loved one without ever having to come knock at the door.

“There’s an assumption,” she told me, “that when a Black kid comes to the emergency department, the problem is behavioral. It’s not depression.”

our traumas and illnesses are frequently intertwined with American history and the peculiar reality of being Black. And at times, our traumas would be compounded and exacerbated by poor, discriminatory, or nonexistent treatment when we needed support the most.

I’ve grown convinced that when you swallow your pain it never does digest. I suspect that untreated pain curdles your blood and changes your code. It sinks into your bones, it blisters to the surface, and then it presents like diabetes, alcoholism, depression, obsessive compulsion, cancer.

Crownsville had become a weapon against those who dared oppose the existing order.

Behaviors that had once been associated with poverty and illness became part of a growing list of crimes that could land you in jail.

A new preoccupation with crime not only expanded its definition but also reconfigured crime-fighting methods.

But you cannot outrun pain. It will creep down the branches of your family tree until it finds someone who is tiring of the sprint. It will take hold of that person who is willing to acknowledge that it is there, and demand that they find their way back through the forest.

It was a reminder to me that the complexity and mystery of mental illness are no excuse to not take action, push for change, or find small ways to help the people around us.