01/30/2024

What a Jim Crow-era Asylum Can Teach Us Today About Mental Health

Appearances may not be as accurate as we'd like them to be

From the outside, the Hospital for the Negro Insane of Maryland, which opened in Crownsville, Maryland, in 1911, looked like a farm, with patients harvesting tobacco, constructing gardens and working with cattle.

But Peabody award-winning NBC journalist Antonia Hylton says the hospital's interior told a different story. Inside, Crownsville Hospital, as it became known, had cold, concrete floors, small windows and seclusion cells in which patients were sometimes left for weeks at a time. And the facility was filthy, with a distinctive, unpleasant odor.

"There was a stench that emanated from most of the buildings so strong that generations of employees describe never being able to not smell that smell again, never being able to fully feel they washed it out of their clothes or their hair," Hylton said.

Please select this link to read the complete article from NPR.