Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum
Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum
Director of the Center for Disability Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of History
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Abstract
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 re-entering the community. They also spoke about the friendships forged among asylum inmates, many of which persisted after mad people left the asylum. Many inmates argued that asylums were more akin to prisons than medical facilities and testified before state legislatures and the US Congress, lobbying for reforms to what became popularly known as “lunacy laws.” Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum exposes the centrality of changing and conflicting relations of care in producing wider ideological and systemic shifts in the history of madness – a process in which the individual and collective efforts of ordinary people shaped structures and cultures much larger than themselves.
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