About Administrations of Lunacy
• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: The New Press (April 14, 2020)
A scathing and original look at the racist origins of psychiatry, through the story of the largest mental institution in the world
Today, 90 percent of psychiatric beds are located in jails and prisons across the United States, institutions that confine disproportionate numbers of African Americans. After more than a decade of research, the celebrated scholar and activist Mab Segrest locates the deep historical roots of this startling fact, turning her sights on a long-forgotten cauldron of racial ideology: the state mental asylum system in which psychiatry was born and whose influences extend into our troubled present.
In December 1841, the Georgia State Lunatic, Idiot, and Epileptic Asylum was founded. A hundred years later, it had become the largest insane asylum in the world with over ten thousand patients. Administrations of Lunacy tells the story of this iconic and infamous southern institution, a history that was all but erased from popular memory and within the psychiatric profession.
Through riveting accounts of historical characters, Segrest reveals how modern psychiatric practice was forged in the traumas of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. Deftly connecting this history to the modern era, Segrest then shows how a single asylum helped set the stage for the eugenics theories of the twentieth century and the persistent racial ideologies of our own times. She also traces the connections to today's dissident psychiatric practices that offer sanity and create justice.
A landmark of scholarship, Administrations of Lunacy restores a vital thread between past and present, revealing the tangled racial roots of psychiatry in America.
THOUGHTS/REVIEW:
When I started out my nursing career, I was a mental health nurse and really enjoyed my years there working in a locked psychiatric unit specializing in the LGBTQ population. Mental Health Nursing will always have a special place in my heart.
Reading this book by Mab Segrest, a longtime activist in social justice movements and a past fellow at the National Humanities Center, gave me an eye opening look at the harrowing and highly racist history of mental health asylum and psychiatric institutions through stories from the founding of what once was the Georgia State Lunatic, Idiot, and Epileptic Asylum in 1841.
This was well written and carefully well researched that addressed the horrific blemished past of psychiatric treatments and its unfair and racist treatment of African Americans and women. Segrest was able to connect how modern psychiatric practice was ultimately formed and lead to the eugenics theories in this modern times.
Absolutely brilliant writing that I learned a lot from.
Please use the hashtag #administrationsoflunacy, and tag @tlcbooktours, @thenewpress, and @mabsegrest.
Purchase Links
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Photo by Laura Flanders[/caption]
About Mab Segrest
Mab Segrest is professor emeritus of gender and women’s studies at Connecticut College and the author of Administrations of Lunacy and Memoir of a Race Traitor (both from The New Press). A longtime activist in social justice movements and a past fellow at the National Humanities Center, she lives in Durham, North Carolina.
Connect with her on Instagram.
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