I was so wedded to my notebook that one of the other patients was convinced that I was an undercover journalist, and nicknamed me Lois Lane; Lois Lane, and not Nellie Bly, whose asylum exposé instigated an $850,000 increase in the budget of the New York City Department of Public Charities and Correction. I never learned the diagnosis of the young man who called me Lois, and he claimed that he had no idea why he was in the hospital. I couldn’t tell if there was anything wrong with him. In Ten Days, Bly writes: “The insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island is a human rat-trap. It is easy to get in,
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