Madness Quotes

“As sociologist James M. Fendrich put it: Black Vietnam veterans came back to America and had to face “the transition from ‘democracy in the foxhole’ to discrimination in the ghetto at home.” Their anger and alienation from American society was simmering, not dissipating. The military, as it turned out, was ahead of most large American institutions in its pace and willingness to integrate.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“African Americans were placed in ground combat battalions in higher percentages than whites, and while African Americans made up just over 10 percent of the general population in 1965, they suffered 24 percent of the U.S. Army’s fatal casualties. Among Black soldiers a paranoid theory emerged: perhaps they were putting us on the front lines for genocidal purposes.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“In fact, the director of forensic psychiatry at Crownsville, Dr. Osker T. Koryak, went on the record saying that many defendants had been confined at Crownsville for periods of sixty days or longer as a result of court orders and that 90 percent had been returned to the courts with certification that they were competent. In other words, officials used the asylum as a waiting room for the accused, with an astounding error rate and with the added result that by virtue of their (sometimes dubious) status as insane persons, the person held would lose the right to live and work privately until their arraignment.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“That increasingly optimistic and sympathetic climate of the mid-twentieth century set the stage for deinstitutionalization, or the mass patient exodus from asylums. In 1963, the push for community-centered care came to the forefront as United States president John F. Kennedy announced the Community Mental Health Act.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“In a 2018 meta-analysis of fifty-two different studies, researchers Charles Olbert, Arundati Nagendra, and Benjamin Buck found that Black Americans are 2.4 times more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia than white Americans. Back in 2014, a separate study found clear patterns in which Black Americans were diagnosed at a rate three to four times as high as white people, and Latino Americans were diagnosed at a rate more than three times higher than white Americans.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Metzl found that clinicians started to depict Black mental patients as threatening and uncontrollable, while white patients with the same illness were described sympathetically as “withdrawn,” nonviolent, and compliant. Suddenly, the rates of schizophrenia among Black men skyrocketed, and the entire image of the disease changed. The title of Metzl’s book came from a 1968 piece in Archives of General Psychiatry, in which two psychiatrists redefined schizophrenia as “a protest psychosis” that involved Black patients who had become hostile, aggressive, and developed “delusional anti-whiteness” after listening to leaders like Malcolm X or showing interest in the practice of Islam.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Behaviors that had once been associated with poverty and illness became part of a growing list of crimes that could land you in jail. The list included urinating in public, sleeping outside, begging for food, and consuming food on the train.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Their resistance was nothing more than seeking rest and basic human treatment. But they had crossed both physical and invisible color lines, and the punishment for that in the South was not just public shame—it was a portrait of insanity. Crownsville had become a weapon against those who dared oppose the existing order.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Black staff—and particularly Black women—were at the bottom of the hospital’s social hierarchy. They didn’t have the superintendent’s ear and weren’t setting policy. The point that went unsaid but understood was that Black people should be grateful for the chance to work at Crownsville. Keeping your head down and taking orders was part of the job.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“The line between what was normal and professional and what was abuse wasn’t always clear.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Between 1952 and 1960, a flurry of studies involving Crownsville patients are mentioned in the records, although I was never able to find any summaries or conclusions of their findings.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“rapidly professionalize, even as its leaders and practitioners were scrambling in the dark. Every early development and disease categorization, and every plan for how to treat a child like Elsie, was being touted as a great advancement. In truth, they were treating symptoms, and they knew next to nothing about the origins of mental illness and distress. That didn’t stop the pressure to construct a veneer of competence. Psychiatrists and psychologists across the country started to gather more frequently at conferences and symposiums.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“In the midst of this push, in the fall of 1954, the APA notified Superintendent Arnold Eichert that Crownsville failed to meet basic standards and would not be approved for accreditation. The APA echoed what patients and their families had been saying for years: Crownsville was severely overcrowded and understaffed.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“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

“their care. 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

“Over the years, Crownsville had developed into a dumping ground—a place that seemed to swallow the undesired, poor, and nonconforming Black residents of Maryland and, at times, deny them fundamental human rights.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“patient population was not arriving of its own will. The hospital received “too many teenagers with no hope,” she said, and many of them arrived by force. Lee argued that there was “too large a percentage of cases where people are picked up off the street and taken to Crownsville without the knowledge of relatives… Less than 2% of the mentally ill are brought by relatives.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Then, Donald realized that a lot of the patients he met were admitted only because county jails were too full. Even when Donald didn’t know a patient’s complete backstory, he was often baffled by how healthy and “normal” they were.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“staff were white people writing about Black patients in this period. Patient records and monthly hospital reports from the 1950s and early ’60s, at least those found or made available to me and other researchers, suggest that Crownsville was better equipped for production and industrial maintenance than it was outfitted for therapy and treatment. By neglecting almost all personal and contextual information about their patients and doing little to preserve even a doctor’s account of clinical encounters, the hospital erased the patients’ humanity.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Clinical notes often privilege the provider’s point of view and enforce hierarchies and power. Doctors and nurses were the ones who decided what was valuable information and what would constitute the story of patients’ lives behind Crownsville’s walls.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Former patients have spoken and written about Crownsville the way formerly incarcerated people do of their time in prison. Their instincts, their ways of thinking, their movements are broken down and readjusted to fit this world with its own rules. As time goes on, it becomes harder and harder to feel like part of the outside world, to know they have a place in it if they ever find their way back.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“The horse reared back and frightened its rider, a local white woman. For the “crime” of frightening a white woman on a road, this woman spent years at Crownsville. That was all Joyce could see in documents about her psychiatric history. Sifting through patient records, Joyce regularly came across similar strange notes. “You’d read stories like that, that had no reason why they should be in Crownsville,” Joyce said to me incredulously. “They came to Crownsville and never got out.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“the patient delivery. Former Crownsville employees and even relatives of local law enforcement officers have repeatedly described how they received money in exchange for bringing people to the hospital. It’s part of what fueled the nightmares of Black Annapolitans, who used to worry about “night doctors” roaming the streets to bring someone to Crownsville under the cover of darkness.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Rumors notwithstanding, Black people across Maryland were facing systematic violence. People were still sent to Crownsville for the slightest indication of ill health and nonconformity. And after arriving at Crownsville, patients were still crammed into small, overcrowded rooms and given often indifferent treatment. In the 1950s, there were plenty of authentic horrors at Crownsville and elsewhere.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“succeeded. Desegregation was not the cure to the hospital’s problems but rather its new and messy rebirth. As Black staff took on new responsibilities and grew close to their patients, they found themselves bound by the same indifferent, violent, and bureaucratic forces that Eichert had no patience for. The difference, though, was that they couldn’t simply walk away.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“It wasn’t until November 1962 that the State Board of Health and Mental Hygiene ordered the desegregation of all mental hospitals in Maryland.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Not long after, the Ways and Means Committee issued a report finding what lawmakers had known back in 1948: children with developmental differences didn’t belong in asylums with adults, Crownsville’s facilities were not equal to those at Rosewood, and the state couldn’t afford the millions that it would cost to construct and hire staff for a separate but equal equivalent on Crownsville’s grounds.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“His fear wasn’t only for the children and families of Rosewood, but for what this might do to the entire balance and culture in Maryland. More than a year before the Supreme Court would declare racial segregation unconstitutional, Schiebel said aloud what many others in the room—in the country—were thinking and hoping to hold on to.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“They argued that their protest actually wasn’t about race—it was about a crisis of resources. They were worried about the well-being of their children at Rosewood, about how additional patients could lead to overcrowding. They”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“but they knew Yankees well. It didn’t take long for them to strategize a new approach, realizing that overt racism might not win a man like Dr. Perkins over.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum