The definition of insanity is: "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
What, excepting torture, would produce insanity quicker than this treatment? Here is a class of women sent to be cured? I would like the expert physicians who are condemning me for my action, which has proven their ability, to take a perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up and make her sit from 6 A.M. until 8 P.M. on straight-back benches, do not allow her to talk or move during these hours, give her no reading and let her know nothing of the world or its doings, give her bad food and harsh treatment, and see how long it will take to make her insane.
People in the world can never imagine the length of days to those in asylums. They seemed never ending, and we welcomed any event that might give us something to think about as well as talk of.
Soon after my advent a girl called Urena Little-Page was brought in. She was, as she had been born, silly, and her tender spot was, as with many sensible women, her age. She claimed eighteen, and would grow very angry if told to the contrary. The nurses were not long in finding this out, and then they teased her. “Urena,” said Miss Grady, “the doctors say that you are thirty-three instead of eighteen,” and the other nurses laughed. They kept this up until the simple creature began to yell and cry, saying she wanted to go home and that everybody treated her badly. After they had gotten all the amusement out of her they wanted and she was crying, they began to scold and tell her to keep quiet. She grew more hysterical every moment until they pounced upon her and slapped her face and knocked her head in a lively fashion. This made the poor creature cry the more, and so they choked her. Yes, actually choked her. Then they dragged her out to the closet, and I heard her terrified cries hush into smothered ones. After several hours’ absence she returned to the sitting-room, and I plainly saw the marks of their fingers on her throat for the entire day.
The most gruesome abuses, however, take place in a corner of the asylum deceptively called the Retreat. She relays the devastating experience to Bly: For crying the nurses beat me with a broom-handle and jumped on me, injuring me internally so that I will never get over it. Then they tied my hands and feet and, throwing a sheet over my head, twisted it tightly around my throat, so I could not scream, and thus put me in a bathtub filled with cold water. They held me under until I gave up every hope and became senseless. At other times they took hold of my ears and beat my head on the floor and against the wall. Then they pulled my hair out by the roots so that it will never grow in again.
The beatings I got there were something dreadful. I was pulled around by the hair, held under the water until I strangled, and I was choked and kicked. The nurses would always keep a quiet patient stationed at the window to tell them when any of the doctors were approaching. It was hopeless to complain to the doctors for they always said it was the imagination of our diseased-brains, and besides we would get another beating for telling. They would hold patients under the water and threaten to leave them to die there if they did not promise not to tell the doctors. We would all promise because we knew the doctors would not help us, and we would do anything to escape the punishment… Among other beatings I got there, the nurses jumped on me once and broke two of my ribs.
As Bly’s ten-day stay in the inferno of insanity comes to an end, she leaves with unsettling awareness of the fate of those “poor unfortunates” confined to the asylum for good:
The Insane Asylum on Blackwell’s Island is a human rat-trap. It is easy to get in, but once there it is impossible to get out.
I had looked forward so eagerly to having the horrible place, yet when my release came and I knew that God’s sunlight was to be free for me again, there was a certain pain in leaving. For ten days I had been one of them. Foolishly enough, it seemed intensely selfish to leave them to their sufferings. I felt a Quixotic desire to help them by sympathy and presence. But only for a moment. The bars were down and freedom was sweeter to me than ever.
Ten Days in a Mad-House is well worth reading in its entirety, despite the excruciating discomfort — not only for Bly’s beautiful prose and sharp-witted observations, but also for the timeless reminder of how little it takes for power structures to mutate into abuse of marginalized groups and how crucial it is for us, as a society and as individuals, to find — to empower — to be — the Nellie Blys who call attention to injustice, effect change for those less privileged, and perhaps, above all, find the soft beams of kindness, those expansive rays of the human spirit, even amid the harshest of realities.
