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MADNESS: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

When we learn about the global history of mental healthcare and the birth of institutions like the asylum, Black patients are conspicuously absent from the history books, excluded from the narrative of recovery. Nowhere is this truer than in the history of Maryland’s Crownsville Hospital for the Negro Insane. In Madness, Emmy award-winning news correspondent, Antonia Hylton explores Crownsville’s history and how the legacy of slavery and racist stereotypes ultimately pave the way to the criminalization and stigmatization of Black patients.