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Book Cover for: Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum, Mab Segrest

Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum

Mab Segrest

Hardcover
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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.

Book Details

  • Publisher: New Press
  • Publish Date: Apr 14th, 2020
  • Pages: 384
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 9.10in - 6.20in - 1.40in - 1.45lb
  • EAN: 9781620972977
  • Categories: • History• Mental Health• Discrimination

About the Author

Segrest, Mab: - Mab Segrest is professor emeritus of Gender and Women's Studies at Connecticut College and the author of Memoir of a Race Traitor: Fighting Racism in the American South, an Outstanding Book on Human Rights in North America and Editor's Choice for the Lambda Literary Awards, as well as Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry (both published by The New Press). A past fellow at the National Humanities Center, she lives in Durham, NC.

Praise for this book

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