Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum

The asylum--at once a place of refuge, incarceration, and abuse--touched the lives of many Americans living between 1830 and 1950. What began as a few scattered institutions in the mid-eighteenth century grew to 579 public and private asylums by the 1940s. About one out of every 280 Americans was an inmate in an asylum at an annual cost to taxpayers of approximately $200 million. 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. 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." Michael Rembis demonstrates how their stories influenced popular, legal, and medical conceptualizations of madness and the asylum at a time when most Americans seemed to be groping toward a more modern understanding of the many different forms of "insanity." The result is a clearer sense of the role of mad people and their allies in shaping one of the largest state expenditures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--and, at the same time, a recovery of the social and political agency of these vibrant and dynamic "mad writers."

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Hearing Voices Chapter 1: Claiming Madness Chapter 2: Committing Violence Chapter 3: Writing and Work Chapter 4: Exposing Abuses Chapter 5: Reforming the System Chapter 6: Reckoning with Physicians Chapter 7: Surviving Treatments Chapter 8: Forging Friendships Chapter 9: Helping Each Other Epilogue: Telling Stories Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Michael Rembis is the Director of the Center for Disability Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). He has served on the American Historical Association's Committee on Disability, the Organization of American Historians Committee on Disability and Disability History, and the board of directors of the Society for Disability Studies.

Review :
Michael Rembis's book rewrites the history of madness, at last foregrounding the ideas, action and lived experience of mad people through over a century of asylums. More than that, it provides powerful foundations for the modern Mad Studies movement to realize its goal of offering an inclusive, decolonizing route to understanding and supporting our future wellbeing. This is an essential text. This impressive book curates hundreds of stories by mad people between 1830 and 1950. Heralding a new intellectual approach to histories of madness, Michael Rembis invites readers into the worlds of 'mad writers' as they started public conversations, invoked themes of justice and visibility, and sought reform. This is an exciting, radical history of mental illness as experience, of mad peoples resistance and striving for connection, community, and peer support. This superb and accessible book underlines the central importance of mad writers who worked to influence public opinion on what madness means and why institutionalized people must be taken seriously about their own experiences. Writing Mad Lives makes a major contribution to remembering the work of mostly long-neglected authors while correcting the historical record by showing that mad activism in the US long pre-dates the second half of the twentieth century. Michael Rembis's book rewrites the history of madness, at last foregrounding the ideas, action and lived experience of mad people through over a century of asylums. More than that, it provides powerful foundations for the modern Mad Studies movement to realize its goal of offering an inclusive, decolonizing route to understanding and supporting our future wellbeing. This is an essential text. This impressive book curates hundreds of stories by mad people between 1830 and 1950. Heralding a new intellectual approach to histories of madness, Michael Rembis invites readers into the worlds of 'mad writers' as they started public conversations, invoked themes of justice and visibility, and sought reform. This is an exciting, radical history of mental illness as experience, of mad peoples' resistance and striving for connection, community, and peer support. This superb and accessible book underlines the central importance of mad writers who worked to influence public opinion on what madness means and why institutionalized people must be taken seriously about their own experiences. Writing Mad Lives makes a major contribution to remembering the work of mostly long-neglected authors while correcting the historical record by showing that mad activism in the US long pre-dates the second half of the twentieth century.