Madness Quotes

“reimagining ways to serve patients in clinical settings. As chief of the Psychology Department, Sparks piloted and championed a clinical internship program that brought in experts from across the state of Maryland. The program was so successful that interns began serving patients beyond Crownsville’s walls, and the application pool included graduate students at prominent Black colleges and universities, including Howard, Morgan State, and Fisk, as well as research institutions such as New York University and Temple University. To this day, the outgrowth of that internship program remains fully accredited, serving patients and providing valuable training for mental health professionals.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Both Jacob and Vernon had been forever altered by war, eugenics, and dehumanization. Both men had traveled through Europe and studied in New York. But in Maryland, their missions converged. It was an outsider and a refugee—not one of Maryland’s cultural or political insiders—who were able to see Crownsville’s truth and move without fear to improve it.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“The social service department, where employees labored to reconnect patients with kin or find young children a home, was entirely Black from Gwendolyn Lee’s appointment until the 1960s. In 1949, there were 1,800 patients and 392 staff members. Just five of those employees were Black. By 1956, there were 2,300 patients and 745 staff members, 326 of them Black.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“He couldn’t stop questioning why some of these people had been admitted to the asylum in the first place. He started brainstorming how he could create opportunities for them to get away from Crownsville’s grounds and to express themselves creatively.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Black nurses learned to listen intently to what their patients had to say. Sometimes the patients would tell staff they had arrived at Crownsville after stealing small items like fruit or candy.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Some of the white nurses and aides used drugs on the job, even as they worked with patients who had, in some cases, been forced into Crownsville for drug or alcohol use. A few of the white aides could not read or write, and would ask their Black colleagues to complete patient reports for them. It frustrated some of the new Black employees, who felt that they didn’t have the luxury of making mistakes or relying on others. Incompetence and overt hostility from white staff were often met with restraint from the small but growing clique of Black employees.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Many of the white employees had come to Anne Arundel from far away, often from rural counties deeper in Dixie. In Gertrude’s view, they didn’t seem to understand or like the patients, and often avoided coming close to them. The previous hiring system at Crownsville had allowed white candidates to benefit from a less competitive applicant pool and process. Many had little more than a high school education. Black nurses and doctors like Sparks, on the other hand, typically competed for a handful of spots, and many of them had multiple degrees.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Whether they liked it or not, she and many other Black employees hired throughout the late 1940s and 1950s became symbols of change and discomfort. While their jobs provided opportunities for upward mobility, they were also on the receiving end of intense resentment and hostility from white colleagues. At times, they experienced the same degrading treatment and isolation that had long been endured by the patients.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“measured by strict professional yardsticks. Still, their psychological practice was quietly informed by a belief that this country had never yielded Black Americans a complete and secure self-consciousness. They observed in their patients that the world seemed to always tell them that Black people were not really American—that they were not professional, not smart. They often lacked a sense of security and a sense of place. The two doctors realized it was only sheer will that could keep some of their patients from being torn apart by the messages they’d received.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“The white institutions were to be expanded to between 10 and 11.5 square feet of therapy space, Crownsville to only 6.5. The imbalance was impossible to ignore.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“At Crownsville, seclusion was common and conditions were recognized by hospital workers as inhospitable and cruel. And yet the same cells and patterns of abuse persisted for years. The abnormal treatment of Crownsville’s patients did not go unnoticed at the time, as they often festered in plain view of attendants and inert officials. It was only with the help of civil rights activists, Black doctors, and reporters—and in spite of state leaders—that patients’ stories occasionally pushed past hospital walls.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“pay. The result was a shocking ratio of one doctor per 225 patients, and a hospital that was only occasionally offering psychotherapy. Furthermore, the hospital had only 110 attendants, though its budget allowed for 217.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“crimes. In those early years, less than 5 percent of patients had any sort of criminal record. So, although a small fraction of Crownsville patients entered the asylum classified as dangerous, the employees at Crownsville were alleged to be engaging in an unusual preference for confinement and seclusion.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“In response, a community of Black residents working with the NAACP and the families of patients started to raise alarms. Their volunteer efforts, and the letters and notes they wrote, were crucial not only to the future of patient care, but to correcting a whitewashed record of the hospital’s operations. Black church groups and women’s clubs were among the first to come and visit Crownsville’s patients.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“that he knew had died after receiving these beatings. Muller was clearly shaken; he had been an attendant in white hospitals for over thirty years, but the conditions at Crownsville were by far the worst he’d ever experienced.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Between 1889 and 1930, 3,724 people were lynched in the South; over four-fifths were Black. In almost every case, no serious effort was made to identify and punish lynchers. How could you not go mad?”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Consistently, the records that did exist privileged the perspective of the state or the provider over the patient, who was almost never quoted or given the opportunity to speak for themself. The files I managed to find often said so little and revealed so much at the same time.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“The Baltimore Afro-American, a local newspaper for Black residents, wrote: “Mr. Murray had a good reputation for conduct and was employed in the rug shop. Often he turned out three or four small rugs a day which are sold by the institution for $3 a piece.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Crownsville’s founding took vestiges of chattel slavery—from the style of the rolls to the financial recordkeeping format used on plantations—and translated them to a clinical setting.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“time spent outdoors was beneficial to patients. Patient labor was often called industrial therapy, and it was popular in virtually every American mental hospital in the first half of the twentieth century. They often instituted factory-in-hospital programs, stealing inspiration from mental institutions that had long assigned patients tasks in England and Continental Europe.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“lives. I spoke with three former employees who grew up in Annapolis and Baltimore and recalled that well into the 1960s, it was common knowledge that Crownsville patients were rented out to local companies looking for cheap labor. Two of the employees were told that the patients were paid about fifty cents per day. While they might receive a part of their wages, most would go to offset the cost of their care at the hospital.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Decades later, in January 1949, a series of local newspaper articles described a Black physician named Dr. J.E.T. Camper, who alleged that patients who were well enough to be released were being held at Crownsville because of the value of their services to the institution. At a meeting of the Mental Hygiene Society of Maryland—an organization of leading psychiatrists and physicians—Dr. Camper stated that he had been instrumental in obtaining the release of patients unfairly held at the hospital and that he believed other patients who could be dismissed were held “in a sort of peonage.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“The mere mention of emancipation sent shivers down the spines of some of Maryland’s leaders. According to Wennersten, they were petrified by the potential loss of over half a billion dollars in property, and the looming threat of Black political equality.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Early records and photos of Crownsville’s founding led me to question America’s legacy of race in mental health: What does it mean to be healthy and well enough to clear the woods, build a road, and construct a hospital, yet also be so sick you require institutionalization? How do we decide who’s irredeemable and who’s capable of recovery? What role have men like Robert Winterode played in alienating Black patients from therapy and care?”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“It would be the first and only asylum in the state, and likely the nation, to force its patients to build their own hospital from the ground up. Black Marylanders would have to earn their access to healthcare through hard labor and a return to the antebellum social order.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“By 1755, descendants of Africans, most of whom had been ripped from nations in the interior of the continent, made up about one-third of Maryland’s population. In some areas, they were closer to half the population. They”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Later in his paper, he criticized northern physicians who had “ignorantly” attributed signs of mental illness in Black people to the trauma of having been enslaved. But he did not let their ideas interfere with his own hypothesis. The possibility that physical abuse, forced labor, and being owned by another human might produce mental trauma was not of scientific concern.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“In 1851, several decades before Winterode’s project began, a well-known physician by the name of Samuel Cartwright gave this ailment a “professional” term: drapetomania. Cartwright, a physician and professor at the University of Louisiana, wrote about his pseudoscientific beliefs and observations of African slaves. “Drapetomania,” he asserted, was the irrational and unnatural desire of a slave seeking freedom. If slaves didn’t have white people to take care of them, they would regress. He believed that enslaved people who misbehaved and ran away from their owners would develop drapetomania, and that slave owners who treated the enslaved with too much kindness could trigger it.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Throughout the nineteenth century, one doctor by the name of Dr. Francis Stribling created a set of criteria for the care of Negroes in asylums. Primary to his criteria was that Black and white people were different and must, therefore, be treated separately. He also believed a patient’s cure should involve work that was similar to what that person did prior to hospitalization. For Black people, that meant more unpaid physical labor. Stribling was the chair of Virginia’s mental health commission and a member of the American Psychiatric Association (APA). His writings influenced psychiatry throughout the nineteenth century,”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Social and Mental Traits of the Negro, that had been published in 1910, the same fateful and charged year in which she had been born. In it, a white sociologist named Howard W. Odum argued that “the migratory or roving tendency seems to be a natural one to [Black people], perhaps the outcome of an easy-going indolence seeking freedom to indulge itself and seeking to avoid all circumstances which would tend to restrict its freedom.” Odum believed that a Black person’s desire for autonomy and mobility was the byproduct of a self-indulgent lifestyle, that the Negro had no pride in their ancestry, no ideals, and no lasting adherence to an aspiration of worth. In her memoir, Pauli reflects on how the discovery of the paper helped her see her father’s refusal to rest in a new light. Her father had fought against these stereotypes and pseudoscientific beliefs through his personal and professional devotion to excellence.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum