Administrations of Lunacy, Mab Segrest
Administrations of Lunacy, Mab Segrest
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
Club: $12.49

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

Author: Mab Segrest

Narrator: Hillary Huber

Unabridged: 15 hr 14 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/14/2020

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included


Synopsis

Today, ninety 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 todays 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.

About Mab Segrest

Mab Segrest is an American feminist and activist who attended Duke University and received her Ph.D. in English literature. The founder of many social-justice organizations, she speaks on topics such as sexism, classism, and racism. She’s currently conducting research on the Central State Hospital in Milledgeville, Georgia.


Reviews

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......more

Goodreads review by Kimba

Mab Segrest, a feminist and anti-racist author, painstakingly traces the racist origins of psychiatry in the United States through the lens of the patients and doctors who walked the corridors of Milledgeville Asylum in Georgia. These origins begin with the purchase of the land on which the Milledge......more

3.5 stars rounded up. When I was asked to be a part of this tour, I immediately said yes because I have never seen a book like this. I expected it to be bad, but I did not expect it to be horrifying. This is an interesting take on the Milledgeville Asylum in Georgia, which happened to be in the Sout......more