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 America's troubled present.

About the Author

Mab Segrest is professor emeritus of gender and women's studies at Connecticut College and the author of Administrations of Lunacy and Memoir of a Race Traitor (both from The New Press). A longtime activist in social justice movements and a past fellow at the National Humanities Center, she lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Reviews

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

Book Information
ISBN 9781620972977
Author Mab Segrest
Format Hardback
Page Count 384
Imprint The New Press
Publisher The New Press