New book ‘Madness’ documents the racism of a Jim Crow-era mental health facility

Amna Nawaz:

Crownsville State Hospital in Maryland was one of the last segregated mental asylums in the country and it operated for some 93 years. Thousands of Black patients came through over the years and many of them died there.

NBC News correspondent Antonia Hylton began looking into the facility a decade ago during her first year of college. I spoke with her recently about her findings which, she details in a new book, “Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum.”

And I asked her why she wanted to tell this story.

Antonia Hylton, Author, “Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum”: It was my freshman year, and I stumbled into a course about the history of psychiatry, and I became obsessed.

On the one hand, it was an academic obsession, a passion for the history of mental health. But there was also a personal aching and longing, I think, because I come from a very big, tight-knit family. I’m one of seven kids.

But the one topic that always seemed off-limits when I was growing up was mental trauma and mental illness. And that’s because I came from a family with a long history of dealing with those issues and loved ones, relatives who had spent time in institutions not unlike Crownsville.

And so when I finally was out of my own as a young adult, it was my moment to explore, to try to find myself, my family, a bit of my history reflected somewhere. And I stumbled across — upon a footnote about Crownsville Hospital.

And I didn’t know then what this would become, but I knew that I had found something really special and really important, a key piece of Black history, of the history of psychiatry. But, really, it’s an American story, a story that I think implicates all of us.