Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

by Antonia Hylton

But the study and treatment of mental illness became especially vulnerable at that time. The field was essentially still in the Dark Ages—doctors were only just discovering medications and testing them out on patient populations that were warehoused, disorganized, long mistreated, and frequently misdiagnosed. Anxieties about race, resistance, and societal change crept into psychiatry and reshaped everything about the clinical context for all patients, not just African Americans. The Elkton Three were an example of this kind of infiltration, an early sign that some white leaders and doctors would, wittingly or unwittingly, misread Black anger as mental illness and use tools of psychiatry to punish, not to heal, the communities they were meant to serve.