bethbarron's review against another edition
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
Wow, where do I start?
Mab Segrest takes readers on an incredible 170 year journey through psychiatry, politics, and prisons.
This was incredibly informative, if dense and time consuming to read.
I'm glad I stuck with it.
Mab Segrest takes readers on an incredible 170 year journey through psychiatry, politics, and prisons.
This was incredibly informative, if dense and time consuming to read.
I'm glad I stuck with it.
jlschless's review
slow-paced
3.0
Segrest's look into the Georgia State Lunatic, Idiot, and Epileptic Asylum (renamed four times over the decades) is incredibly in-depth and harrowing. However, I often felt that what she was trying to say or explain was lost in a muddle of statistics, speculation with certain patient's stories that never seemed to truly fit in with the narrative, and a repetitiveness that sometimes felt condescending as if Segrest had to over explain to make sure readers understood what she was trying to get across.
dianna_reads's review against another edition
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
maweets's review against another edition
4.0
This really took me a while to get through but I really felt like I learned a lot by the end of the book. My biggest critique is that I think this book spends a lot of time establishing the historical context for treatments and philosophies for care (or lack there of) seen at Milledgeville. At times I really felt like I had gotten into the weeds of history before I remembered what exactly it related to.
I did really appreciate the level of research and care that went into this book. I appreciated that the author wove in as many individual stories as possible to give better insight into the day-to-day experiences of many of the people who endured Milledgeville or similar situations.
I think this is a great foundational book for readers who are just beginning their research into how disability rights play into other forms of activism. I think that individuals either have done lots of research on disability rights or who have plenty of lived experience with the intersection of race and disability might view this work differently.
I did really appreciate the level of research and care that went into this book. I appreciated that the author wove in as many individual stories as possible to give better insight into the day-to-day experiences of many of the people who endured Milledgeville or similar situations.
I think this is a great foundational book for readers who are just beginning their research into how disability rights play into other forms of activism. I think that individuals either have done lots of research on disability rights or who have plenty of lived experience with the intersection of race and disability might view this work differently.
kamikazefinn's review
4.0
It’s a no brainer for many that the justice system is messed up and mental health needs are heckin important why aren’t we making them more accessible guys but if you come across some privileged, entitled twit that just doesn’t get it then feel free to chunk this book directly at their face.
book_ish_bitch's review
4.0
Wow I loved this book. Such an important topic deserves the utmost respect, research, and objectivity, and Lab Segrest has curated just that experience in this haunting recollection of systemic racism and its far-reaching implications. A must-read for anyone in the helping professions.
paisleygreen's review
3.0
Administrations of Lunacy is an account of a single asylum in Milledgeville, GA from its founding on stolen indigenous lands to its eventual decline in the 20th century. Through it, Segrest is trying to tackle a lot of threads to ultimately make the case that early American psychiatry's racist past heavily informs our present.
As someone who wrote her thesis on 19th-century psychiatry and literature, I thought this book was for me, combining my interests and research passions. And to an extent, this book does that. Segrest often nicely contextualizes the specific historical records and lacunae in the broader context of American history--for instance, highlighting the notable lack of attention to very real traumas inflicted on Black Georgians by war, by lynch mobs, and by Jim Crow. (These do not show up as reasons for admission in the records.) She consistently calls attention to the injustices done by the asylum system to Black inpatients, and she vividly tells the stories of, I imagine, everyone that appears for more than a line or two in the historical record.
But my issue with the book is that the writing style is at once too dry and too speculative to really succeed as more than a historical narrative. There are a lot of statistics in this book, and so many patient stories are told that I began to wonder why the story was included at all. It seems like it'd be more impactful to include stories that were emblematic of an issue, but a lot of times it was like "here's another patient who was here in 1872."
As for the speculation, whenever Segrest describes a patient or a person who worked at the Milledgeville asylum, she over-relies on "perhaps" to try to appeal to pathos, but as a text dealing with historical archives, it comes across almost as fictionalizing their stories. For example, Segrest tells the story of Sue Pagan, a white woman who lived and worked as a laundress with a Black family after being separated from her baby and released for the first time from the Milledgeville asylum. She was taken back to the asylum despite presenting "no symptoms of insanity other than insomnia and talking at night." The facts alone are tragic, and Segrest deftly uses them to discuss the intersection of insanity, control, and white Reconstruction-era racial fears. But then she writes, "There is no record of what happened to Sue on the inside. Perhaps her work detail was the laundry, where she could remember the white sheets sailing on the clothes lines back in Shermantown and the two Black women who had treated her well." The perhapses, the fictionalization, galled me because they felt manipulative and detracted from the genre of the book as a historical monograph.
[Shout out to NetGalley for an advance copy to review honestly.]
This is a history not only of the New Jim Crow, but also of the first Jim Crow, and before that of chattel slavery itself and the genocides of Indigenous people, and the still-fighting Confederacy, all of whose afterlives we have yet to vanquish."
As someone who wrote her thesis on 19th-century psychiatry and literature, I thought this book was for me, combining my interests and research passions. And to an extent, this book does that. Segrest often nicely contextualizes the specific historical records and lacunae in the broader context of American history--for instance, highlighting the notable lack of attention to very real traumas inflicted on Black Georgians by war, by lynch mobs, and by Jim Crow. (These do not show up as reasons for admission in the records.) She consistently calls attention to the injustices done by the asylum system to Black inpatients, and she vividly tells the stories of, I imagine, everyone that appears for more than a line or two in the historical record.
But my issue with the book is that the writing style is at once too dry and too speculative to really succeed as more than a historical narrative. There are a lot of statistics in this book, and so many patient stories are told that I began to wonder why the story was included at all. It seems like it'd be more impactful to include stories that were emblematic of an issue, but a lot of times it was like "here's another patient who was here in 1872."
As for the speculation, whenever Segrest describes a patient or a person who worked at the Milledgeville asylum, she over-relies on "perhaps" to try to appeal to pathos, but as a text dealing with historical archives, it comes across almost as fictionalizing their stories. For example, Segrest tells the story of Sue Pagan, a white woman who lived and worked as a laundress with a Black family after being separated from her baby and released for the first time from the Milledgeville asylum. She was taken back to the asylum despite presenting "no symptoms of insanity other than insomnia and talking at night." The facts alone are tragic, and Segrest deftly uses them to discuss the intersection of insanity, control, and white Reconstruction-era racial fears. But then she writes, "There is no record of what happened to Sue on the inside. Perhaps her work detail was the laundry, where she could remember the white sheets sailing on the clothes lines back in Shermantown and the two Black women who had treated her well." The perhapses, the fictionalization, galled me because they felt manipulative and detracted from the genre of the book as a historical monograph.
[Shout out to NetGalley for an advance copy to review honestly.]