Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

by Antonia Hylton

In the years after the hospital’s closure, Crownsville employees found it deeply painful to travel into Baltimore or drive along Route 450 in Annapolis, where their former patients would be sleeping under bridges. Even from a distance, nurses and doctors could tell their patients had long been disconnected from their medication regimens. “Seeing so many of the patients then, you would know their faces from Crownsville. They would know you,” Joyce Phillip told me, describing her daily rides along Route 450. She had worked with patients who had been at Crownsville since they were teenagers, and the hospital was all they had known in adulthood. She started to question whether deinstitutionalization had been a noble project or an abject failure and a violation of human rights. “It’s hard to trust the current system that the right funding would ever be there.” She believed no patient should ever be brought back into the massive, abusive warehouses she saw at the start of her career in the 1960s. But some of Crownsville’s physicians told me they estimated that up to 90 percent of the homeless people they saw in the area in the early 2000s were former Crownsville patients. There had to be a better way forward.