Reviews - Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

867 reviews for:

Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

Antonia Hylton

4.35 AVERAGE

unapologeticallyjen's review

4.25

challenging emotional informative sad medium-paced

mmboo's review

3.0

slow-paced

sirsmeds's review against another edition

4.5

emotional informative sad medium-paced

wendimatt's review against another edition

I just can’t read nonfiction right now. The info was important and it was well written, I have burnt myself out on nonfiction

This book felt a little confused. I went into it expecting a deep dive into the horrifying story of one segregated asylum to illustrate the conditions that mentally ill black people were facing across the US, and in some ways still are. There were elements of this dotted throughout the book which led to deeply emotional and compelling narratives that communicated the horrible situation perfectly. This was supported with discussion of wider social contexts to examine why this happened and why elements are still perpetuated today. However, I felt that we often got too caught up in these wider contexts. There are only 2 or 3 stories in the whole book which I think actually show the experiences of the people being mistreated themselves. Everything else is the story of someone else; staff who could go home at the end of the day and who could assert that they were only peripherally aware of abuse because they were kind to patients or the stories of family members who only found out what had happened from hospital mandated records. We never fully grappled with the full situation. This led to emotional disengagement throughout the book despite my best efforts. Additionally, the discussion of context often lacked nuance or critical analyses because the author was trying to cover so much- venturing beyond the initial idea of the book. Overall, a pretty solid read but one that could have used a little more reworking.