What happens behind the closed doors of Insane Asylums has always been a dark mystery that is uneasy to think about.  From movies and scary stories, people’s perception on what life was like for the mentally ill in the 19th and early 20th century tends to be negative and filled with horrors.  During 1887, Nellie Bly faked insanity in order to be checked into the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in New York City.  In her memoir, “Tens Days in a Mad-House”, the Pittsburgh born journalist confirms many people’s view of asylums through her first hand accounts of the terrible nutrition, poor living conditions and constant physical and mental abuse of patients.

Nellie Bly experienced the awful food and nutrition the patients would receive.  Within the first day of her stay, Bly recalls the horrendous bread at the asylum when she writes, “I tasted and one taste was enough.  It had no sugar, and it tasted as if it had been, made in copper” (286).  While she did not want to consume the food, a patient did tell her, “You must force the food down… else you will be sick, and who know but what, with these surroundings, you may go crazy” (286).  Not only did patients in Asylums have to eat food in order to survive and not become deathly ill, they were also forced to eat all their rations or else punishment would be handed to them.  It was very hard for many to eat all the food as most accounts of the hospitals cuisine were quite negative.  Many ex-patients say the food was poorly cooked, and would have bugs and dirt caught inside the breads and meats from time to time because of the poor kitchen sanitation.  Yet despite the nasty selection of food, because the government funded these Asylums, the staff forced people to eat in order to not waste government spending.  To do this many locations, such as Saint Elizabeth’s Government Hospital for the Insane, used feeding tubes in order to force feed the ill patients.  What made this force-feeding so traumatic was that the nurses actually shoved the tubes up the nostrils of the patients.  This painful technique was used as both punishment and as a scare tactic for those who did not follow the proper eating orders of the hospital (Abuse of Patients).  The extreme lack of sanitation mixed with poor food quality made for a very unpleasant eating situation especially when punishments for not finishing meals were involved.

The poor living conditions Bly faced confirm the stereotypical view of the Asylum environment.  When the nurses would gather the women in the halls, Bly described the horrible conditions when she said, “How we shivered as we stood there! The windows were open and the draft went whizzing through the hall.  The patients looked blue with cold, and the minutes stretched into a quarter of an hour” (285). These conditions were no place for patients to leave healthy.  The reader can tell it was cold and miserable based on the diction uses like “Shivered” and “blue with cold”.  According to many historians these nasty conditions Bly encountered were actually a large proponent in the corrosion of the mental state of patients.  Because a majority of Asylums are state funded, the staff members had a lack of care of the facility.  A large proponent in why the asylums were so filthy was because the nurses and staff working did not care about the occupants of the hospitals.  These conditions created a setting of a fight for survival.  The state consistently shoved as many mentally ill patients in the smallest possible holding space.  Bly stayed in a women’s asylum, which was mostly used for divorced women.  These conditions worsened for asylums such as those, because of the view of divorce in society during the time (Selkirk Mental Hospital).  The conditions Bly witnessed on Blackwell’s Island are very similar to not only a majority of asylums but also specialized women asylums.

There were countless examples Bly witnessed of physical and mental abuse towards patients.  Bly recalls this abuse when she writes, “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 hysterical every moment until they pounced upon her and slapped her face and knocked her head in a lively fashion” (297).  This sentence provides a helpless feeling and empathy in the reader for the mentally ill who had to experience this terrible treatment.  This poor treatment has been found to occur in a multitude of other Asylums.  In the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, there were often complaints and reports of the staff restraining and assaulting the mentally ill patients through “Toweling” kicking and handcuffing, as well as using a device known as the “saddle”.  This method of toweling was when nurses and staff members would use a towel to choke and twist the patient’s neck from behind in order to control them.  This would cause large health issues, as any times patients would loose consciousness (Abuse of Patients).  The large amount of physical and mental abuse from Bly’s memoir can be confirmed through history and research of Asylums.

The majority of the physical brutality came from kicking and hitting patients, as well as using handcuffs and restraining devices to keep the mentally ill in line.  Nellie Bly captures the true horror of physical punishment when she describes an old lady being disciplined.  She writes, “One woman had on a straightjacket, and two women had to drag her along. Crippled, blind, old, young, homely, and pretty: one senseless mass of humanity. Not fate could be worse” (292).  This quote captures the morbid character of Insane Asylums. Bly uses perfect diction when she writes “one senseless mass”.  This phrase embodies the main idea of her experience.  That everything is lifeless, and so dead that one cannot truly grasp it unless present in the situation.  Restraining patients was a very common punishment in many asylums during the 19th and early 20th century.  Just like in Nellie Bly’s experience, straightjackets were used as a torture and restraining device. Sometimes the nurses would leave them on for hours on end.  Another way staff members would control unruly patients is the saddle.  The saddle, according the historian Carla Joinson, “was a device which held patients in a reclining position, bound hand, foot, and neck, so that they couldn’t move at all” (Abuse of Patients in Asylums). This in turn did nothing to help the patient but instead drive them to become even more mentally ill.  The pure torture and cruel physical abuse of the patients witnessed by Bly, is very closely related to the historical accounts in many different Asylums.

In the late 19th and early 20th century insane asylums were a popular way for doctors and psychologists to put away mentally insane people to a place where they would supposedly receive the care they needed in order to be healthy.  This issue is a majority of the time these asylums actually did more damage to the mentally ill due to terrible nutrition, unlivable living conditions and mental and physical abuse by the staff members.  Nellie Bly, a brave journalist, put a stop to these conditions by exposing the asylums in her memoir “Ten Days in a Mad-House” where she stayed in the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in New York City in order to experience and write about the people and conditions of the mysterious asylums people hear about in stories.
