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 America's troubled present.
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 America's troubled present.
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.
Praise for Administrations of Lunacy:
"Incisive. . . . Impressive and meticulously documented."
—Public Books
"This valuable book helps to show how white supremacy shaped the
definition and care of people with mental illness from the start,
and how psychiatry remains in its shadow."
—Nature
“From the author of the groundbreaking Memoir of a Race Traitor
comes this compelling examination of racism in psychiatry through a
case study of Milledgeville Asylum in Georgia.”
—Ms. magazine
"Through engrossing tales of historical characters, Segrest reveals
how modern psychiatric practice was forged in the traumas of
slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow."
—The Palm Beach Post
"After a decade of research, Mab Segrest, whose Memoir of a Race
Traitor forever changed the way we think about race in America,
turns sanity itself inside-out in a stunning book that will become
an instant classic."
—365 Atlanta Traveler "Based on a decade of research, this
important history links the rise and fall of a major American
insane asylum with the growth of the for-profit prison system."
—Shelf Awareness
“Administrations of Lunacy reaches across disciplines and sources
making connections between people and institutions where records
are often silent. . . . The book is at its best when Segrest stays
grounded in the patient case files she is privy to, bringing to
life some of Georgia’s most forgotten and marginalized people.”
—Southern Spaces
"A valuable contribution to the history of mental health care and
of the racist applications of medicine."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A thorough, revelatory history of Southern psychiatric
racism."
—Booklist
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