Martin Summers's book Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions

 

Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions is a history of the federal mental institution, Saint Elizabeths Hospital, and its relationship to Washington, DC's African American community. It charts the history of Saint Elizabeths from its founding to the late-1980s, when the hospital's mission and capabilities changed as a result of deinstitutionalization, and its transfer from the federal government to the District of Columbia. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including patient case files, the book demonstrates how race was central to virtually every aspect of the hospital's existence, from the ways in which psychiatrists understood mental illness and employed therapies to treat it to the ways that black patients experienced their institutionalization. The book argues that assumptions about the existence of distinctive black and white psyches shaped the therapeutic and diagnostic regimes in the hospital and left a legacy of poor treatment of African American patients, even after psychiatrists had begun to reject racialist conceptions of the psyche. Yet black patients and their communities asserted their own agency and exhibited a "rights consciousness" in large and small ways, from agitating for more equal treatment to attempting to manage the therapeutic experience.

Reviews

"With St. Elizabeths Hospital's history as a fulcrum, Summers balances psychiatric practices and racial ideologies to give us a nuanced understanding of the racism that structured institutionalized mental health care. This is a masterful and sophisticated historical analysis that explicates the reasons and consequences for the disparities that continue to haunt this nation." Susan M. Reverby, author of Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy

"In each generation, a book appears that changes the ways in which we view the past. Martin Summers has written such a book. His study of African American patients at Saint Elizabeths Hospital offers a probing and searching treatment of mental illness and mental health among black residents of Greater Washington, DC. The result is a powerful reminder of how racism, discrimination, and subjugation produced deleterious effects while depression, mania, and psychosis victimized individuals and their families." Earl Lewis, Professor of History and Afroamerican and African Studies, and Director of the Center for Social Solutions, University of Michigan

Author Information

Martin Summers is a professor of history at Boston College.