Amna Nawaz:
Crownsville State Hospital in Maryland was one of the last segregated psychiatric hospitals in the country and operated for approximately 93 years. Over the years, thousands of black patients came to the hospital, many of whom died there.
NBC News correspondent Antonia Hilton began researching the facility 10 years ago when she was a freshman in college. I recently spoke with her about her discovery. She details in her new book, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum.
And I asked her why she wanted to tell this story.
Antonia Hilton, author of Madness: Race and Madness in Jim Crow Asylums: It was my freshman year of college, and I stumbled upon a course on the history of psychiatry and was hooked.
On the one hand, it was an academic obsession and a passion for the history of mental health. But I come from a large, very close-knit family, so I think there was some personal pain and longing as well. I am one of seven children.
But the one topic that always seemed off-limits since I was a kid was psychological trauma and mental illness. That's because I come from a family that has been dealing with these issues for many years, and relatives and loved ones who have spent time in facilities similar to Crownsville.
And when I finally came out of myself as a young man, it was a moment for me to explore and try to find myself, my family, parts of my history reflected somewhere. And I happened to come across a footnote about Crownsville Hospital.
I didn't know at the time what this was going to be, but I knew that I had found something really special and really important, an important part of Black history and the history of psychiatry. But really, I think this is an American story and a story that concerns all of us.
