Madness Quotes

“betting her professor, Spottswood Robinson, ten dollars that Plessy v. Ferguson, the landmark Supreme Court ruling that had deemed segregation constitutional when separate facilities were “equal,” would be overturned.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“By the early twentieth century in Baltimore, it became illegal for a white person to move onto a street that was more than 50 percent Black and illegal for a Black person to move onto a street that was more than 50 percent white.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Maryland had never joined the Confederacy, although large parts of the state were openly sympathetic to its cause.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“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.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“the strength to acknowledge the limits of what they know and to remain open to asking new questions.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“children need community, pride in their history and heritage, safety, green space, and open dialogue with adults that they trust. Dr. Benton believes we need to recruit more nonwhite professionals into mental health fields, and to offer them peer support as they navigate grueling and competitive educational programs. In the meantime, she tries to train clinicians who don’t have a shared ethnic, linguistic, or socioeconomic background with their patients to get to know the families and their communities.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Dr. Sims believes this country needs more inpatient treatment space and to approach mental health diagnoses the way we do cancer. Just as we have specialists and advanced facilities devoted to specific types of cancer, he believes we need doctors, nurses, and aides who work together in teams focused on a specific problem of the mind.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“The rest of us have to decide if we’re open to listening or if we are going to continue burying our heads deeper and deeper into the sand. The crises of mental illness, housing insecurity, and income inequality bear down on all of us. There will be more Jordan Neelys who come into public view and refuse to be quiet about the humiliations they’ve endured. We can try to construct cities and communities where these embarrassments remain out of view, where we keep up this lie that we are separate and unscathed, but it is only going to get harder. There are too many people who know the truth. There are too many families with loved ones who may call out for help in the future.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“point, I found myself less surprised by the fact that Jordan Neely had interacted with the legal system, and more troubled by the fact that public servants had forty chances to get Jordan connected to care and had failed every single time.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“She announced that day in April that the legislature had provided an initial $30 million in funds for the county to turn the hospital grounds into a memorial, park, and museum. Janice planned to work closely on the land’s development with her friend, Democratic county executive Steuart Pittman.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“All of it. It’s like what if—what if after slavery had ended, there was truly some semblance of reparations, not necessarily the way we look at reparations now, but what if we had just gotten forty acres and a mule? What if we and our farmers had continued to own their land? What if people were able to prosper? What would our culture look like today? Instead of that, I met Crownsville and I’m at this place with these people.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“what if these people were cared for in a proper manner? What could they have been? What could they have accomplished? What would their lives have been?”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“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.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“According to Dr. Sims, by the end of 1997, the recidivism rate for those patients dropped from 35–40 percent down to 5 percent. Then he got a call. “I was just told one day that the program would be disbanded. The thinking at that time was that it was not, quote, ‘an efficient use of doctors’ time.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“African Americans constituted 75 percent of Maryland’s prison growth in the mid to late twentieth century, according to the Justice Policy Institute. Rates of imprisonment have begun to decline in recent years, but they continue to disproportionately harm Black communities in Baltimore and the Eastern Shore. When”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“It is precisely the fact that our incarcerated populations look closer to Crownsville’s demographics that led me and other journalists and historians to raise questions about who benefited from deinstitutionalization and who did not. Is it a coincidence that at the very historical moment when the asylum was being dismantled, the prison, which had collaborated and exchanged extensively with hospitals like Crownsville, rose to prominence? And how might the prison have relied materially and operationally on the asylum’s legacy?”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“What he saw was that Black patients were generally less able to afford lawyers and often at a higher risk of having their conditional release revoked.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“some patients were being pushed out of the door directly into danger, while those who were left behind could be subject to the violence and mistreatment of a bygone era. It seemed to them that none of this represented progress or community mental healthcare.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“The pressures were coming from the top down. The hospital sought to downsize at almost any cost, and in that rush, it created all kinds of hypocritical conditions.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“And Retreat was not the only example of an asylum being annexed into prison infrastructure. Parsons tracked down at least sixty-nine examples across the United States of existing correctional facilities that were once mental health institutions.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“She found that during the 1970s and 1980s dozens of developmental centers, mental hospitals, and sanatoriums were converted to prisons, and that, in some cases, the annexation of mental hospitals into penal institutions allowed states to preserve union jobs that “were important to the financial welfare” of their communities. As Parsons explained in her book From Asylum to Prison, conversations around mental health funding were part of a broader financial reallocation from health and welfare systems to the criminal legal system.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Truthfully, the entire dream of community mental health had never materialized, and it wasn’t just because states had trouble matching funds and the number of centers available in major cities like Baltimore was limited. The centers had become notorious for focusing their resources on the treatment of patients who had the least severe diagnoses. They welcomed the elderly and adults with high-functioning depression, while those suffering with chronic and untreated illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder continued to cycle from admission to discharge in places like Crownsville. The dream died a death by a thousand different cuts. President Reagan helped close the casket and lower that dream into the grave.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“deinstitutionalization didn’t happen for everyone—at least, not with equal opportunity. And as a population that had effectively been twice damned and dishonored, many Black patients couldn’t benefit from the open arms of deinstitutionalization’s community-centric mental health mantra because they were allegedly responsible for the nation’s apparent moral decline and utter lawlessness. Historical records and employee testimony suggest Crownsville became emblematic of a broader, shape-shifting carceral ecosystem in the late twentieth century. The lines between incarceration and treatment, jail and hospital, became even muddier than they were before. As the patient became the inmate, the hospital’s story raised the question: what was the difference between deeming Black populations irredeemable or incurable?”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“deinstitutionalization didn’t happen for everyone—at least, not with equal opportunity. And as a population that had effectively been twice damned and dishonored, many Black patients couldn’t benefit from the open arms of deinstitutionalization’s community-centric mental health mantra because they were allegedly responsible for the nation’s apparent moral decline and utter lawlessness.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“And at the close of World War II, the ethnoracial makeup of American convicts was proportional to our national demographics: approximately 70 percent of the prison population identified as white and 30 percent as “other.” By the end of the twentieth century it had completely overturned to 70 percent African American and Latino and 30 percent white. Crownsville’s records suggest that, while the story is nowhere near as simple as one institution morphing into the other, it is no coincidence that the end of the twentieth century marks both the decline of the mental hospital and the expansion of the prison system.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“It appeared Crownsville’s patients were not only receiving less care, but when they did get support, they were more likely to have contact with people adjacent to the criminal justice system than the kinds of professionals who would have welcomed them back into jobs and school—the fundamental pillars that form community.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“To put it bluntly, domestic programs without committed advocates or politically valuable constituents were vulnerable. Long-term mental healthcare had long been the province of state governments, not the federal government. The Nixon administration had no interest in micromanaging local clinics and hospitals or in sustaining a payment structure, like Medicaid, in which the federal government would be on the hook for 40 to 50 percent of matching funds.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“By the mid to late 1960s there was mounting evidence that the state-federal partnership spurred by President Kennedy’s 1963 Community Mental Health Act wasn’t working as planned. Across the country, states were having difficulty meeting basic requirements mandated by federal law, and were having trouble finding state and local funds for construction and staffing to match a desired contribution from the federal government. As”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“The dream of community mental healthcare—that optimism that so defined the late fifties and early sixties—was crashing and burning. Patients were leaving hospitals and finding there were no clinics to visit. State lawmakers who had acted incensed when there were scandals at their local asylums and had celebrated the shrinking of state institutions were no longer raising their hands to fight for new projects. The rug was getting pulled out from under the system.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“She had met Black men like him before, men whose country had sold their health and well-being for a false performance of democracy.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum