Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

by Antonia Hylton

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. Perhaps that is part of what makes us so unsettled when we encounter others who can’t conceal how sick, lost, and distraught they feel. We are confronted with a choice—when what we really want to do is to shirk responsibility. We are reminded that we are not so healthy and virtuous after all. We’re forced to consider the role we might have played in isolating our neighbors, and how crazy it was that we ever thought we could alienate them, cut funding for the programs that helped them, dispose of the park benches where they might have found rest, and then somehow avoid a public confrontation. It’s cruel. It’s madness.