Administrations of Lunacy

An Author Talk with Mab Segrest

Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum by Mab Segrest

In December 1842, The Georgia State Lunatic, Idiot and Epileptic Asylum was opened on land stolen from the Muscogees in a building paid for by state profits from that theft. For the first quarter of a century, its patients were the white settlers whose psyches were shaped by war and violence. After Emancipation, counties sent African Americans into a growing psychiatric fiefdom brutally segregated by race. Over 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. Through meticulous research and 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. Connecting this history to the modern era, Segrest then shows the factors that helped set the stage for the eugenic theories of the twentieth century and the persistent racial ideologies with devastating consequences in our own times.

About Mab Segrest

Mab Segrest was born in 1949 in Birmingham, Alabama and grew up in Tuskegee where her family on both sides had lived for over a century. Steeped in its white version of southern history, she grew up into the crucible of the civil rights movement. In more ways than one, this movement arrived at her door and kept on knocking. Her childhood experience in Alabama’s apartheid culture shaped her future work as an activist, writer and scholar. As a young woman, she left Alabama for graduate school in North Carolina where she earned a PhD in English literature from Duke University in 1979. Segrest has been a Mellon Distinguished Professor at Tulane, a Fellow at Emory’s James Weldon Johnson Institute, the Newell Visiting Scholar at Georgia College and State University, and a Fellow at the National Humanities Center. In 2018, after spending five years in Brooklyn, she returned to Durham where she now lives, writes, and organizes.

Event image credit: Freaktography from Getty Images via Canva.com

Book cover and author image courtesy of author

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