Madness Quotes

“After all that she had seen, she left that day most concerned about the prospects of the staff—not the patients.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Brewer Hill Cemetery is the oldest resting place for Black Annapolitans. Black families continue to fight for its restoration. But if you peer through the trees, you can see a pristine military cemetery maintained by the government. Photo by Cassandra Giraldo.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“I believe that madness is part of all of us, all the time, that it comes and goes, waxes and wanes. —Otto Friedrich”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“They were human, and the longer they worked there, the more often they found themselves in situations that forced them to ask the same questions over and over again. Is it worth it, doing incremental good in an imperfect system? Can you be a good person and work somewhere where something like this happens? Paul and many of the employees at Crownsville remind me of a story I grew up hearing from the Caribbean side of my family. One of my aunts in particular loved the Starfish Story. Legend has it that a young Black boy—in Haiti or Cuba or the Dominican Republic, you choose—is walking along a beach that is littered with starfish. Thousands upon thousands of starfish have washed up onto the shore following a terrible storm and they are helpless, dehydrating in the sun. So the little boy begins picking the starfish up one by one and throwing them back into their home in the water. Other people at the beach look at the boy, laugh, and call him naive. One person approaches him and tells him bluntly, “Give up. It makes no difference. You’ll never be able to save all of these starfish.” The boy pauses for a second. He looks up, then leans back down to toss another starfish into the sea. “It makes a difference for that one.” Many of the people of Crownsville decided that it was better to throw as many starfish back into the ocean as they could rather than abandon them all on the shore.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“They were human, and the longer they worked there, the more often they found themselves in situations that forced them to ask the same questions over and over again. Is it worth it, doing incremental good in an imperfect system? Can you be a good person and work somewhere where something like this happens?”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“The total Department of Mental Hygiene budget for 1969 was over $56 million, but ninety-seven cents of every dollar spent on mental health was still going to the hospitals. Leaving only 3 percent allocated to the community programs.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“As historian Jonathan Engel argued in a sprawling investigation of deinstitutionalization and the movement to build Community Mental Health Centers (CMHCs), the federal government “seemed oblivious” to the states’ struggles.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Black employees were often assigned to the furnaces, where they were provided with limited safety equipment and clothing. Horrible burns and life-altering accidents were routine.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“In some cases, employees would administer high levels of insulin to a nondiabetic person, causing them to lose consciousness, sometimes for hours, and emerge in a strange stupor.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Surgeons would take an instrument resembling an ice pick, and through a hole drilled in the patient’s head or a pathway through the eye socket, they would cut and scrape away the connections between a patient’s prefrontal cortex and the rest of their brain.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“The great 1950s push for research in mental hospitals involved numerous human rights violations,” Paul wrote to me. At the time he arrived in the 1960s, staff were sometimes still offering patients cigarettes and candies in exchange for trying out new drugs.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Plagued by low funding and negative public perception, the hospital seemed incapable of escaping its legacy of systematic racism. “Segregation was expensive,” the article read, “and the people who suffer most when budgets are cut are the patients in the Jim Crow institution.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“If a fight broke out at Carr’s Beach and the jail was too full, you were sent to Crownsville. If you were young and unsupervised late at night, you were taken to Crownsville.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“It’s impossible to quantify how many Black children lost or lost track of parents, aunts, uncles, and friends to the hospital. In fact, it took decades for Rodney to come to terms with his aunt’s story.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“wanted to know more about the moral gray areas, the painful decisions, the bizarre balance of power between white employee, Black employee, and Black patient.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“So in 1953, when the National Mental Health Association asked asylums around the country to mail in any shackles or chains they’d previously used, Maryland leaders were eager to take part.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“By the late 1940s, stories about violent escapes, aggressive Black men, and the anxieties of white residents were becoming routine.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Some patients had their own beds. Others slept on straw ticks and wooden benches. There were three toilets, three washbasins, and one tub to be shared by over ninety floormates.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“It’s estimated that a majority of people living with schizophrenia have these auditory hallucinations at some stage.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Decades after they had been forced to build themselves an asylum, Black patients at Crownsville were still trapped in a cycle of free labor.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Spring Grove and Springfield, the two largest white hospitals in the state, produced only $197 and $137 per acre respectively, while Crownsville produced $242. Despite its chronic underfunding and smaller patient population, Crownsville was able to extract substantially higher yields than its peer hospitals.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“He described how employees would discuss the fact that a higher proportion of patients at Crownsville were working than at any other hospital in Maryland, and that the hospital was so short on funding from the state that it “could not survive without the work the patients did.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“PARTNER, PENTA, AND FERAL FATE, TWO BLACK LABS AND A BELGIAN Malinois, stood at the foot of Crownsville’s grounds, taking in a massive scent pool. The hospital’s remaining 485 acres still stretch out of sight. For dogs trained to find cadavers and human tissue, this was a gold mine. “It’s kind of like going into a disaster. It’s a multiple-fatalities disaster so it smells everywhere,” their trainer told me. At just nine months old, Feral Fate was the youngest and least experienced on the team that day. Together, the three took pause to acclimate to the powerful odor.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“But Moses said to the people, “Do not fear! Stand by and see the salvation of the LORD which He will accomplish for you today; for the Egyptians whom you have seen today, you will never see them again forever. The LORD will fight for you while you keep silent.” —Exodus 14:13, New American Standard Bible”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“What were the odds? A woman who looked like Estela, a descendant of enslaved people from the same narrow island, founding her own order and educational practice during slavery? Here, she was surrounded by women in her image, even if of a different nationality. It was a community and campus full of Black women who had come from all over the country and all over this earth, united in the radical and optimistic belief that little Black girls could be anything and everything. My grandmother was to be no exception. She credited the Sisters’ love and protection as the guiding force that helped her heal an aching loneliness,”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Despite its bucolic appearance, Crownsville was a modern, highly productive farm—one that was able to produce much of its own food and even practice irrigation, all thanks to the labor of its patients. But that idyllic facade helped to mask a darker truth behind its walls.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“My father is a funny combination of honest and reserved. Honest, in that he will answer any question you ask truthfully. Reserved, in that if you fail to ask excellent follow-ups, he will keep all the key details to himself. At eleven, you don’t ask great follow-up questions, so my dad was able to stay at the story’s surface and sidestep most of its pain. Almost two decades later, after years of observing my own family, I’ve grown convinced that when you swallow your pain it never does digest. I suspect that untreated pain curdles your blood and changes your code. It sinks into your bones, it blisters to the surface, and then it presents like diabetes, alcoholism, depression, obsessive compulsion, cancer. At least, that’s what it looks like in my family. My father’s and his father’s pain likely have become my own unease and obsession. In changing his own DNA, he changed mine. He may remember Maynard as a cousin and friend, but his refusal to remember out loud means that, for years, I’ve been haunted by a dead man.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“The laborers who had toiled over the grounds were marched inside the buildings, into rooms they had hammered into place, and admitted as the very first patients. But that would not mark the end of their days of work. In addition to planting and harvesting crops on the Crownsville campus, the patients “were taken in motor trucks to adjoining farms within a radius of ten miles,” where they “gathered the crops for the farmers who were without help.” The twenty-eighth Lunacy Commission report boasted about how useful it was to have a captive work force that they could send about town.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“The campus became the home for Black people who were mentally unwell, “feebleminded,” maladjusted. Or, in many cases, simply unwanted.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“In Maryland, and across the country, white doctors, politicians, and local-level leaders became desperate to do something about what they believed were poor, unemployed, and mentally unwell Black populations wandering around, taking up space at almshouses, and allegedly “menacing” innocent children in towns. White physicians and intellectuals had long suspected the Negro race would lose its way shortly after gaining freedom.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum