Apr
14
11:30pm
Virtual Event: Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum --With Mab Segrest
By Charis Books and More/Charis Circle
Join Charis in welcoming beloved SONG co-founder, activist, and author Mab Segrest for her timely book, Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum. Just as our current crisis with Covid-19 exposes the racial inequality at the roots of all American systems, 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 today's 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.
As always, if you enjoy the event we ask that you buy the book from Charis via this link or donate to our non-profit programming arm, Charis Circle, to help fund this work via this link.
By attending our virtual event you agree to our Code of Conduct:
Our event seeks to provide a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), class, or technology choices. We do not tolerate harassment in any form. Sexual language and imagery are not appropriate. Anyone violating these rules will be expelled from this event and all future events at the discretion of the organizers.
hosted by
Charis Books and More/Charis Circle
share