race and insanity in a Jim Crow asylum
"Transports readers behind the brick walls of a Jim Crow asylum . . . [telling] the ninety-three-year-old history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. [Antonia Hylton] blends the tales of patients and employees whose lives were shaped by Crownsville with a decade-worth of investigative research and archival documents . . . [chronicling] the stories of Black families whose mental health suffered as they tried, and sometimes failed, to find safety and dignity. Hylton also grapples with her own family's experiences with mental illness, and the secrecy and shame that it reproduced for generations . . . [and] traces the legacy of slavery to the treatment of Black people's bodies and minds in our current mental healthcare system"--Provided by publisher.
