I did not finish this book. It felt repetitive and I gathered where it was going. The mixing of personal with reporting didn’t work for me here.

I received an ARC of this & a finished copy from the publishers for my honest opinion.

This is a hard book to read and will be super triggering for certain demographics.
Just reading about how black people were put into asylums (when they didn’t need to be there to begin with) and how they were treated was just triggering; and I had to put the book down several times.
However, I do believe it is a book that everyone should read. I think everyone should read this because it is a conversation starter & hopefully helps with the treatment of black patients & their bodies.

It is a bit confusing because it does go back and forth in the timeline of Crownsville, but overall it is a book that I think everyone needs to read.

I had to sit with this one for a bit after finishing it before I could write a review. I was glad that Hylton led with the note about her own family history being an integral part to the writing of this book because I felt that that made it more important to get the story right and gave a purpose to continue her investigation when I'm sure it got so hard to read about the abhorrent "treatment" at Crownsville. This book was so good, yet so infuriating and sadly you can still find so many instances of continued substandard medical treatment for African Americans, including the statistics around maternal outcomes even now in the 21st century. While I can't say that I enjoyed all of the content which equally made me infuriated and sad, I did enjoy Hylton's writing and am glad to have both read and recommended this book to others. A big thank you to Grand Central Publishing and NetGalley for the early access in exchange for my honest opinion.

My first thought reading this book is, Why can we not extend ourselves and do the right thing? It is just that simple. Leaving our most vulnerable to struggle in an Asylum and trying to forget these individuals are people with feelings, need for community, safety, and peace is wrong on every level. This book examines Crownsville Institute. It is extremely well written and researched. It is also clear the author has much empathy and compassion for this important story.

Crownsville Institute only black people went to. It was located in Annapolis, Maryland which I did not even know operated under Jim Crow Segregation. State Mental Hospitals have a long history of very questionable practices. So, now add in rascism, lack of funding, overcrowding, and initially the staff could only be white. How could this possibly work out well? It is doomed to have severe problems. These are obvious. When the staff doesn’t know or understand the population they are caring for, this is a problem. When we mix individuals from jail, the homeless, the severely mentally ill, the displaced showing mildly signs of mental distress, individuals with disabilities, and children we have a serious problem. That is a given, yet it was done. Experimenting on patients without their knowledge or consent causes fear and mistrust. Using the Negro Hospital as a dumping ground for all sorts of problems and the staff must take that person as I patient will not create good results. We hurt, each and every person when we dehumanize them and just try to look away.

I applaud Antonia Hylton for writing this book. It deeply affected me and was disturbing. She has a family member with a serious mental illness. I understand this since anxiety and depression run in my family as well. That is enough to have to struggle through. If you are fortunate, you have family able to carry much of the caretaking and oversight. If you are not, you are probably not going to have a good outcome. This is too much to ask families to carry alone. We must admit the damage afflicted toward black individuals. Most have had to navigate a way of life that does not expect much success to come their way. Now, if you are sick, you add a serious additional hurdle that many just can not overcome. It hurts communities, it hurts society, it hurts our basic dignity.

We owe the mentally ill, and this addresses black individuals, much better. Care and healing must be our goals or do not be surprised when these communities have absolutely no trust in doctors, therapists, or anyone claiming they can help. No one who sees such injustice over generations is going to easily think their well being is a priority. This is shameful and it cuts the ability of many who could strive and bring incredible success to the United States. We must do better, starting immediately.

I read books like this to stay informed. If I don’t know the past history, how can I possibly even suggest solutions? I felt for so many of these individuals. It was quite clear Ms. Hylton is trying to be fair and give informed information. She is trying to bring the complete story out including many employees that cared deeply for some of these patients. Black people working at the institution were in a better position to understand the people living at Crownsville, some for decades. She does not have an ax to grind or not credit those who made contributions. She does one outstanding job with a difficult story to tell.

May we read and learn from our mistakes and have decency and kindness finally prevail. It will make each and every one of us feel proud and know we stand behind those struggling with an illness or sometimes just a different kind of personality. Our overall thinking must change and there is a need to strive for excellence. We need to listen to those who know this population and of course ask the individuals their needs. This goes a long way.

Thank you NetGalley, Antonia Hylton, and Grand Central Publishing for a copy of this book. I always leave reviews of books I read.

I thought this was such a well researched book. I was engaged the entire time, and learned so much!!

Thank you to Grand Central Publishing and Netgalley for this advanced copy!

What an incredible chronicling of not only our collective failure to address mental health issues in the United States but our collective negligence to understand the horrors we inflicted on black Americans in the name of "mental health" and "community safety". Hylton does an excellent job of weaving the story of one place where people were placed either for treatment or punishment, focusing on the residents, staff, and the effect Crownsville had on the local community. The stories are both individual and indicative of systemic failures and purposeful ignorance. I appreciated the author's style and introduction of people, showing kindness when needed and indictment when called for. A must-read for those interested in the effects of systemic racism or the history of mental health in the United States.

I cannot wait for the rest of this book! All kinds of medical institutions during the Jim Crow era were negligent at best and harmful at worst. We still have incredible medical disparities tied to the same mentalities that operated in those systems. But, there were countless doctors and nurses who tried to make a difference for each individual as much as possible. This work promises to bring some of those stories to the foreground - how communities interacted with these racist institutions to try to do what they could for the people trapped in them. Because, while this is about an asylum, there is no naivety that someone actually had to have a mental health problem to end up there. Having a mental health problem adds on so many layers to it all.

For a US survey class, this would be an important read to tie together key concepts
1) Black Codes and Jim Crow and the loophole of the 13th amendment leading to forced incarceration where the institution profits from the free labor of those held by it
2) racialization in America, eugenics, and the lead up to WWII
3) the civil rights movement and efforts to disrupt communities of color
4) the thread through all of this of co-opting and taking success (think MLK and Rosa Parks as taught now while also considering COINTELPRO telling MLK to kill himself and everyone ignoring Rosa Parks's work against rape of black women)
5) white America's overwhelming inability to look at the true history of any of this

🤞🤞please approve me for the full book!!

This was a crazy read and reminded me about histories darkest times. Antonia Hylton has a great writing style for this type of book and I was engaged with what I was reading. You could tell that they knew what they were talking about and had done the research.

For how thorough and informative Madness is it’s incredibly easy to both read and digest. Hylton manages to cover everything that contributed to the facility; from the slaves who were forced to build it to the larger social and political climate that contributed to what happened there and why. While there were a lot of horrors outlined within this book there were so many accomplishments as well. So much black excellence and so many ground breaking individuals highlighted as well. Many of the first black doctors and nurses graduating from HBCUs passed through Crownsville’s doors, making Herculean efforts to save their own people. Working around the clock day after day to show compassion and to allow the patients some semblance of dignity. Black publications like the Baltimore Afro-American working tirelessly to bring the atrocities of Crownsville to light in a real time effort to bring better quality of life for those inside. And last but certainly not least the current work being done by Janice Hayes Williams who is working to preserve the history of Crownsville and to help families find information about their relatives. She is working to put names to the 1700 graves that are marked only by numbered headstones, to give the dead not just peace but recognition. I could go on and on and on about how fantastic this book is. In fact, when I was looking over the pages and pages of notes I’d taken while reading I wished so badly that I was writing a school paper instead of a review. Something that would allow me to restate all of the facts and statistics I had learned. A piece of writing that would be discussed with other people who had read and been moved by this book. It’s been a long time since Ive felt that way. I will absolutely be purchasing this book when it comes out in the new year. Please please please read this book.

When I picked this book I was expecting to find descriptions of neglect or abuse in a psychiatric hospital built to house Black patients in the early 20th century, and it DOES have that, BUT this book is much more than that. Besides the expected racist directors and doctors, there were also a good many people who tried their best to bring a modicum of dignity and true care to Crownsville. many were too overwhelmed by the forces stacked against them, but throughout the book there are the stories of those who tried to make a difference woven in through the narrative of of inequality and hardship.
I have read several books lately that dovetail nicely to show how various institutions run by the government enforce racial divides and perpetuate labor exploitation to fill the void left when slavery was outlawed. If you want to read more I also recommend Of Greed and Glory by Deborah G. Plant and We carry Their Bones by Erin Kimmerle.

Thank you to Netgalley and Grand Central Publishing for the ARC to review.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an early copy of Madness. This book is written by a reporter about mental illness and one particular institution; as expected, it is well researched and documented.
Being white and coming from the Midwest, I had never heard of Crownsville State Hospital. Sadly, I was not totally surprised by the actions taken towards institutionalized patients there. All persons deserve respect, and I feel that Ms. Hylton's work will open eyes to situations that need to be continually confronted and corrected.

An amazing investigative look at an oft-forgotten part of history. This book truly illustrates how the terror of Jim Crow extended to areas of society we have yet to fully consider.

This is a very important and well-written book that puts a spotlight on a part of American history which has been neglected. It provided a very resonant counterpoint to the book by Jeffrey Lieberman that I just read about the current state of knowledge and treatment for schizophrenia. The history of American asylums in general has been completely neglected, and access to patient records even from the 1800s are tied up in overly rigid medical records privacy laws - how can the patient records of my great-great-grandfather who died in 1925 require a court order for me to see? In addition, the asylum that is the focus of this book is in Maryland, where I now live, and is local history for me.

Hylton shines a light on how a segregated asylum like Crownsville was essentially an arm of the criminal justice system. If a police officer picked up a black person on the street who seemed to be in distress or who was just not acting the way the officer wanted them to, instead of trying to charge them with something they would just drop them off at Crownsville and sometimes they would be there for the rest of their lives if they had no family in a position to come looking for them. This even happened to children. Once "patients" - actually inmates - were in Crownsville, the state did not want to provide funding for any kind of actual mental health care, not for black people anyway (see Spring Grove and Springfield which were the hospitals near here for white people), so the place turned into a sort of work camp where people had to produce goods to add to the meager funds of the place, and nobody got any actual care. Once they could no longer refuse to hire black staff, conditions improved a little, in that there were now staff who saw the patients as PEOPLE and treated them as such. Hylton reviews such records as were still in existence from the state government and the historical society, tracks down living former staff and patients, and through them is connected to a whole small community of people who knew Crownsville from the inside.

Hylton discusses the deinstitutionalization movement in the late 20th century from the viewpoint of people at Crownsville, and says many of the same things that Dr Lieberman says - while mental hospitals were often neglectful at best and abusive at worst, the preferable alternative was not to just dump people out on the street. The "community based mental health" system envisioned in the 60s and 70s never came to be because nobody wanted to fund it, so people with no place to go and needs for medication and therapy ended up sleeping under bridges as hospitals like Crownsville were shut down. Because god forbid anybody in America should be given help if they can't produce income for themselves or someone else.

I wish Hylton had made her points about 'why black people go crazy' a little more circumspectly - not because I disagree with anything she says, but because it could lead some readers to espouse the idea that, as it was said in the 70s, insanity is the only sane response to society. Mental illness is caused by more than just rotten things happening, and the development of that idea about psychiatric illness in the 70s just encouraged a lot of people to believe there was nothing wrong with them. I know she is not saying that. Her point seems to be that the relentless state of fear in which black people lived in Maryland would create the conditions in which any hereditary predisposition to mental illness would explode. I agree with her. I wish she had been more explicit about that, because the idea that mental illness is caused solely by environmental factors led to things like the determination in the early-mid 20th century that mental illness was caused by things mothers did wrong.

Sometimes I got a little lost in the chronology, and making a connection between a person I was reading about and the previous time they appeared in the story. That seems to be an occupational hazard of telling the story in this way, and I can see why the way she's telling the story is the best way to tell it. So be prepared to pay attention.

When all is said and done, this book should be read by anybody who's interested in the history of mental health treatment or the history of US racism. I look forward to what Hylton writes about next.

Antonia Hylton's "Madness" takes readers on an eye-opening journey through the haunting history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records, in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. With meticulous research and a deep emotional investment, Hylton brilliantly uncovers the 93-year-old history of this institution, providing a vital perspective on the intersection of race, mental health, and the enduring legacy of slavery.

"Madness" serves as a vital resource for readers seeking a comprehensive understanding of the history of mental health treatment in America from a Black perspective. Antonia Hylton's eloquent storytelling and her unyielding commitment to shedding light on the dark corners of mental health history make this book a must-read for anyone interested in the intersection of race and mental health. Hylton chronicles the stories of Black families whose mental health was profoundly affected as they struggled, often in vain, to find safety and support. What makes "Madness" exceptionally powerful is Hylton's personal connection to the topic, as she reflects on her own family's experiences with mental illness and the secrecy and shame that lingered for generations. Her ability to intertwine her own story with the broader narrative adds a layer of intimacy and authenticity to the book.

Hylton's meticulous investigative research and archival documents bring to life the experiences of patients and employees at Crownsville Hospital. By sharing personal accounts from patients who are still alive, she lends their voices the platform they deserve. Through the poetry, testimonies, and artwork they left behind, the reader is given a rare glimpse into the emotions and experiences of those who were silenced for far too long.

"Madness" also explores the deeply ingrained racism and stereotypes that have persisted in the American mental healthcare system, tracing these issues back to the legacy of slavery. Hylton masterfully exposes how these prejudices have led to the criminalization and stigmatization of Black patients in present times. Her narrative is a compelling testament to the necessity of reframing the history of psychiatry from a pro-Black, affirming perspective, shining a light on important pioneers in the field like Dr. Tami Benton, who play a crucial role in rewriting the narrative of mental health treatment particulary for Black children and adolescents.

Hylton skillfully connects the dots between America's history of mass incarceration and the expansion of prisons and the process of deinstitutionalization, unveiling how these issues are inextricably linked. Thank you to the author and publisher for the e-arc copy!

This is only a chapter of a book? It was fine but i don't know what to say that would be enough to write a review about. 3 stars isn't a direct rating, it's just somewhere in the middle bc i can't rate a chapter.

I absolutely cannot wait for the rest of this book! What an incredibly tragic glimpse into the world of mental health, mental illness and the horrors endured by the African American population during the early 1900s. Before this excerpt I had no idea that Crownsville existed but I now intend to read everything I can find about the institution. Thank you NetGalley for the opportunity to read this!!! I can already tell it will be a 5star read for me!