
Asylums in the nineteenth century were not regulated thoroughly and the vision of helping the mentally insane was out of reach due to financial constraints. The cry for help to improve asylum conditions only came when reporter Nellie Bly infiltrated Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum and wrote about the horrible conditions she witnessed while staying there. Nellie Bly’s 10 Days in a Madhouse, shows the unethical and immoral treatment of patients in Blackwell’s Island Asylum. By understanding the historical background of asylums and misunderstandings of mental illnesses by so many, readers can see how those factors led to the mistreatment of patients while staying in mental institutions. 

In Nellie Bly’s 10 Days in a Madhouse, she went undercover as an insane patient to infiltrate Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum. While in the asylum, she saw how the nurses and doctors mistreated the patients in many ways. She also witnessed the poor conditions the patients were subjected to. When we are introduced to Miss Grupe, a German nurse, we witness the first example of mistreatment of patients. Miss Grupe refused to speak German to Mrs. Schanz, who could not speak English. Bly writes, “But here is a woman taken without her own consent from the free world to an asylum and there given no chance to prove her sanity.” (282-283) Some patients had their freedom taken away because of their nationality and due to a language barrier in asylums for these patients, administrators and nurses were not fully capable of treating patients who needed assistance with language, which led to false confinement and mistreatment. 

When it is Bly’s turn to be examined by the doctor and nurse, they are very conversational and seem to pay more attention to each other than they do to Bly. Bly then remarks that she isn’t insane and doesn’t wish to stay at the asylum, which prompts the doctor to take note of this but ultimately dismisses it. Here we have an example of a misunderstanding of mental illnesses, because the doctor dismissed Bly’s comment and then falsely committed a sane woman into an insane asylum. Bly goes on to talk about her first supper in the asylum and how the food they served the patients was inedible. Miss Neville, another nurse working at the asylum, told the patients “You must force the food down, else you will be sick…to have a good brain the stomach must be cared for” (Bly 286). This is another misunderstanding of mental illnesses, the nurses forced this misconception of being fed and taking care of your stomach will help with patient’s sanity, when in reality the stomach and a patient’s mental illness have no correlation and with the inedible food that was given to the patients can cause an increase of a foodborne illness. After the first supper experience, she was taken to the baths where she tells of Miss Grupe telling Bly, “There isn’t much fear of hurting you. Shut up, or you’ll get it worse…. You are in a public institution now, and you can’t expect to get anything. This is charity… you don’t need to expect any kindness here, for you won’t get it” (Bly 287). This is a prime example of misunderstanding how to treat a mental illness, the threat of force should never be used to against a patient with mental illness, and leads directly to mistreatment of the patient because force could exacerbate the patient’s illness. The historical background displayed from the quote, is that the tax payers from the state helped fund and support the treatment going on in the asylums, and the taxpayers assumed that the patients would be treated morally and just, but that was not the case in many asylums. When Bly talks about her first walk on the island she sees the patients who are considered highly dangerous. The highly dangerous patients are separated from the other patients on the island, which is a safety precaution for the other patients, but the misunderstanding on how to treat these volatile patients is the real issue. The dangerous patients are chained together and given outside time to look at the grass they’re not allowed to walk on. Although dangerous patients were not given many liberties, the nurses had no right to parade them around to show them something in which they can’t touch. 

Finally, Bly has a discussion Dr. Ingram, an assistant superintendent in the asylum who treated the patients with kindness. In their discussion they talk about the conditions of the asylum that the patients have to face and go off on a discussion on what happens to the patients in case of a fire, to which Dr. Ingram replies that they would all most likely burn to death due to the effort it would take to unlock each cell. This helps us understand that although not everyone who worked in the asylum was unkind to the patients, but they still faced unmoral and unethical treatment and in case of serious emergencies the patients’ lives would not be valued enough to be saved. It also shows how asylums were not as modernized as they could have been at that time period by implementing a lock system where nurses wouldn’t have to unlock each door separately. 

Samantha Boardman talks about the history of Blackwell’s Island Asylum and what impact the New York Times had on it in her article, “The Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island and the New York Press”. She states in the article that the asylum “was designed to be a state-of-the-art institution based on the theories of moral treatment… Although in the past, little effort was made to differentiate between types of mental illness” (Boardman 1). Boardman’s article proves that the misunderstanding of the different types of mental illness led the asylum to organize patients with different illnesses in the same location, which would prevent the patients from getting the help they needed to improve their health. Boardman goes on to say that the asylum planned to have four wings each dedicated for different levels of mental illness, but “due to financial constraints, only two wings were completed and almost immediately proved inadequate” (Boardman 1). This historical background of the asylum and information on the financial constraints on the asylum showcases the environment and treatment of patients were at great risk from the start with shoddy buildings and workers who didn’t fit the moral and ethical standards that were envisioned for the asylum. While the asylum was trying to function, the media was looking at the asylum and its patients for entertainment. Local newspapers would write articles about some of the more fascinating patients or about the “grim tales of madness, mistreated patients, wretched conditions, and wrongful confinement” (Boardman 1). This shows the public had a misunderstanding of mental illnesses to allow newspapers to write about the asylum and its inhabitants for the public’s entertainment. 

In David Wright’s article, Getting Out of the Asylum: Understanding the Confinement of the Insane in the Nineteenth Century he tells the reader that families would personally commit relatives they believed to be insane into asylums and reviews confinement in asylums. He writes that “confinement of the insane was a historical phenomenon which crossed national, religious, class, and gender lines, and was, deeply embedded in broader social forces at work in the emergence of modern society” (Wright 155). With society’s fascination with confinement of the insane, it is logical to infer that full understanding of what mental illnesses are or how to handle them in that time period was not fully developed. Since the phenomenon crossed so many boundaries, it was easy for people to confuse different aspects of a person for mental illness, like Mrs. Schanz’s false confinement because she did not understand or speak English. This article also reflects Bly’s text because during her stay at Blackwell’s Island Asylum she witnessed the false confinement due to people of low class and different nationalities. 

By taking into account the historical aspects of asylums and the misunderstanding of mental illnesses in the nineteenth century, readers can come to understand the factors that led to the mistreatment of patients in those asylums. Nellie Bly’s text displayed the misunderstanding of mental illnesses and connected it to the mistreatment of patients in the asylum by giving readers her firsthand accounts of what she experienced while at Blackwell’s Island. Samantha Boardman’s article on the history of Blackwell’s Island Asylum highlights how the media fed on the mistreatment of patients and poor conditions of the asylum.  Lastly, David Wright’s article talked about the historical aspects of the confinement process and the phenomenon it brought about to society.  Overall, by analyzing Bly’s story and the articles that contained historical background of asylums, the reader can understand the mistreatment of the mentally ill Bly witnessed and her experience during her stay in the asylum. The reader can also learn to how to morally understand people who have mental illnesses and understand how they live with their conditions from the texts. 
