Book description
Powerful photographs of the grand exteriors and crumbling interiors of America's abandoned state mental hospitals.
For more than half the nation's history, vast mental hospitals were a prominent feature of the American landscape. From the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, over 250 institutions for the insane were built throughout…
Why read it?
1 author picked Asylum as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Oliver Sack’s forward to this book, which was first published as The Lost Virtues of the Asylum, stopped me cold when I first read it. It was a revelation and started my mind turning. I read the piece dozens of times and then found the source materials Sacks quoted from and read those books, too.
I came of age during the era of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and it was a long unwinding to begin to consider that an institution, a state institution on the order of a large mental health hospital, could do good. But…
From Mona's list on The best books that tell a story of life with mental illness.
If you love Asylum...
December on 5C4
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
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