Special Episode: Antonia Hylton & Madness

This Podcast Will Kill You

Exactly Right and iHeartPodcasts

Health & Fitness, Science

4.8 • 17.1K Ratings

🗓️ 7 October 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The United States is in the midst of a monumental mental health crisis, with one in four people predicted to experience mental illness at some point in their lives. Adequate mental health care remains out of reach of so many due to a myriad of factors: unaffordability, stigma, shame, and racism, to name a few, leaving enormous gaps in mental health equity. The roots of these inequities can be traced back decades, to the earliest psychiatric hospitals founded on harmful racist notions of mental illness. In Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum, author and award-winning journalist Antonia Hylton explores the story of Crownsville Hospital, a segregated asylum in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, built in 1911 by its first patients: twelve Black men. Over the course of the 20th century, the shifting perspectives of race and mental illness played out in the overcrowded and understaffed Crownsville Hospital, with powerful implications for understanding our current failing to deliver adequate care to all in need. Madness is a powerful and necessary book that sheds much-needed light on the intersections between race, racism, and mental illness.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is exactly right.
0:06.2	The Girlfriends is back with a new season, and this time I'm telling you the story of Kelly
0:11.1	Harnet.
0:12.0	Kelly spent over a decade in prison for a murder she says she didn't commit.
0:16.7	As she fought for her freedom, she taught herself the law.
0:19.9	He goes, oh God, Ar, in that jailhouse lawyer.
0:22.9	And became a beacon of hope for the women locked up alongside her.
0:27.0	You're supposed to have been faith in God, but I had nothing but faith in her.
0:29.9	I think I was put here to save souls by getting people out of prison.
0:35.1	The Girlfriends, Jailhouse Lawyer.
0:37.3	Listen on the IHeart radio app,
0:39.0	Apple Podcasts,
0:40.0	or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:57.0	You know, The The Hi, I'm Erin Welsh, and this is This Podcast Will Kill You.
1:32.1	Welcome to another episode of the TPWKY Book Club, where I bring on authors of popular science and medicine books to ask them all about their latest work.
1:43.0	This is truly one of my favorite things to do
1:46.0	because I get to learn about so many fascinating topics.
1:49.6	Like just this season alone, we've covered measles,
1:53.0	the history of the pelvic exam, phage therapy, the aerobiome,
1:57.7	and we've got more on deck for the rest of the season.
2:02.5	If you want to read ahead or see what books we've covered in the past, head over to our website, this podcast will kill
2:07.5	you.com, where you can find a link to our bookshop.org affiliate page under the extras tab.
	...

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