Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

by Antonia Hylton

What does it mean to be healthy and well enough to clear the woods, build a road, and construct a hospital, yet also be so sick you require institutionalization? How do we decide who’s irredeemable and who’s capable of recovery? What role have men like Robert Winterode played in alienating Black patients from therapy and care?

it is no coincidence that the end of the twentieth century marks both the decline of the mental hospital and the expansion of the prison system.

None of the papers asked whether that improbable life, which required one herculean fight after the other, might have contributed to Dr. Allen’s desperation and exhaustion.

Sonia experienced waves of shame and depression after her father’s death. I asked her how she avoided falling as low as she had in the 1970s. All she knew was that something in her was determined to avoid that depth of despair. She would tell herself that she could feel depressed, angry, and low but that she couldn’t stay forever in that place. She would come close to it, but this time, she had the memory of having been there before. She told herself—this would be temporary.

“The very thing that I thought would stop me was the very thing that propelled me. Because once I dealt with that, the stumbling blocks were out of the way. And I felt free.”