What A Segregated Mental Asylum Can Tell Us About Health Care in the US Today

Notes from America with Kai Wright

WNYC Studios

News Commentary, Politics, History, News

4.4 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 29 January 2024

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you were Black with mental illness in the early 1900s, you couldn’t seek help just anywhere. You’d have to go to a segregated asylum like Maryland’s Crownsville Hospital, formerly known as the Hospital for the Negro Insane. The facility opened in 1911 when 12 men were brought into the woods outside of Baltimore and told to start working. They were tasked with creating one of the first asylums for Black Americans with mental illnesses, and they would soon become its first patients.

Kai speaks with NBC News correspondent Antonia Hylton about her latest book, “MADNESS: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum,” which breaks down the dark history of one psychiatric institution, and highlights the hope it offered Black patients. And we hear from listeners around the country about their own experiences with mental health treatment and care in the U.S.

Tell us what you think. We're @noteswithkai on Instagram and X (Twitter). Email us at [email protected]. Send us a voice message by recording yourself on your phone and emailing us, or record one here.

Notes from America airs live on Sundays at 6 p.m. ET. The podcast episodes are lightly edited from our live broadcasts.

Transcript

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0:00.0	What have your discussions with your family been like around mental health?
0:06.0	Typical African American.
0:08.0	You already had a, not crazy, I'm going to say crazy, uncle or aunt that, you know, that's just the way they were.
0:15.0	It's always kind of been a hush, hush, we don't talk about it.
0:18.0	I think it's a difficult balancing.
0:20.0	I mean, I would say within like my immediate family it's not stigmatized I feel like it's
0:24.9	changed recently there's more talk about mental health on social media and you
0:29.8	know among friends peers I know some folks that go to therapy.
0:34.7	You don't tell everybody you go to therapy.
0:36.8	It's less of a curse word.
0:38.2	It's less of a, we don't talk about it.
0:39.9	I think we are able to name the thing, but now we're starting to have to engage with the memories of things that have happened, and now that's a little scary. So, It's Notes from America. I'm Kai Wright. Welcome to the show.
1:09.0	It's Notes from America. I'm Kai Wright.
1:12.0	Welcome to the show. Engaging with memories that
1:16.7	we've tried to avoid or push down is indeed scary, but as someone who will
1:22.0	happily tell you that I'm in therapy, I also know that reckoning with
1:26.1	scary stuff often leads to healing. So this week we're going to engage with some scary memories in our
1:32.0	nation's collective past. memories around mental health care and abuse.
1:37.0	We're going to look at one place in particular, a small town in Maryland that shaped a lot about how we address mental health in this country.
1:45.1	The story begins in 1911 when 12 men were brought into the woods outside of Baltimore
1:50.9	and told to start working.
1:52.8	They were tasked with creating one of the first asylums for black Americans with
	...

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