Madness by Antonia Hylton

This book covers an important topic, which is that while slavery ended by law in the mid-19th century it has yet to really end and here we are in the 21st century. That is layered on top of the treatment of mental illness, the burden of racism and poverty and the toll that takes on ones mental health, and the differential treatment of blacks in the medical system are are here--but the thing that I think distracts the author is that she has a dog in the fight. She has someone in her life that suffered from inadequate treatment and that story drives a certain amount of the telling of this story, which I found a little off the target. The meat of the story is the history of an institution called Crownsville, formerly known as the Hospital for the Negro Insane of Maryland. Crownsville opened in 1911, the hospital itself built by the forced labor of its first patients. At its peak in the 1950s, more than 2,700 people were resident in a place that “existed along the spectrum of asylum and jail and warehouse”. While the things that happened here shared similarities with other psychiatric hospitals in terms of treatment, the conditions were appalling and they lasted longer than in other facilities. In the 93 years of its operation, 1,700 patients who died at Crownsville were buried in a field in the facility’s grounds and nearly 600 other bodies sent to universities for dissection (such as Johns Hopkins, where Henrietta Lacks' cells were harvested and sold for profit) . It finally closed its doors in 2004.