Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum

The asylum--at once a place of refuge, incarceration, and abuse--touched the lives of many Americans living between 1830 and 1950.What began as a few scattered institutions in the mid-eighteenth century grew to 579 public and private asylums by the 1940s.About one out of every 280 Americans was an inmate in an asylum at an annual cost to taxpayers of approximately $200 million.Using the writing of former asylum inmates, as well as other sources, Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum reveals a history of madness and the asylum that has remained hidden by a focus on doctors, diagnoses, and other interventions into mad people's lives.Although those details are present in this story, its focus is the hundreds of inmates who spoke out or published pamphlets, memorials, memoirs, and articles about their experiences.They recalled physical beatings and prolonged restraint and isolation.They described what it felt like to be gawked at like animals by visitors and the hardships they faced r