When analyzing Nellie Bly’s Ten Days in a Mad-House, a central concern is presented. If and when women are medically needed to be placed in a mental health facility to receive necessary treatment, are their needs being met and are they being treated humanely? Bly’s literary work addresses and answers both of these questions throughout her undercover experience in the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island as she pretended to be “insane” to unearth hidden truths. In this asylum, women’s voices were unheard and their basic human rights were unprotected while committed within these institutions. This was due to the lack of public knowledge and awareness of the conditions inside the facilities. Supported by comparing similar situations and contrasting others in history, Bly’s text generously demonstrates the historical issue of mistreatment of women inside mental institutions. Bly responds to this mistreatment by addressing if women should have been inside the facility in the first place supported by undoubtedly valid medical proof, how the women were treated, and the mental state of the women after they had experienced the conditions placed upon them by medical officials. These factors indicate the true horrors Bly experienced in Ten Days in a Mad-House (Bly 281-297).

Nellie Bly placed herself undercover as “Nellie Brown” to investigate the state of women’s mental health facilities. One of the initial things to happen upon arrival at the asylum was a meeting with the head doctor, Dr. Kinier. The women would answer questions and plead their case, attempting to give a convincing argument for their release from the institution. They would try to either justify or explain the reasoning behind the behavior that landed them there in the first place. This was a first step in Bly’s case. In an even voice Bly told the doctor, “I am not sick and I do not want to stay here. No one has a right to shut me up in this manner” (284). The doctor paid no attention to her, along with the other women under questioning. Although the women were allowed to offer their cases, they were wasting their time. This situation aligns with the question, “is there undoubtedly valid medical proof for why these women were admitted into a mental institution?” Bly proves that this was not accurate in one hundred percent of the cases. She herself was mentally sound, but yet she was admitted into the institution. She became one of the women pleading for her freedom, and she was ignored like all of the others.                      

Bly’s initial conversation with the doctor also aligns with the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders in 1928. Christine Collins’s son, Walter Collins, was reported missing on March 10, 1928 in Los Angeles, California. After fruitless efforts to find Christine’s son, the Los Angeles Police Department attempted to substitute Walter Collins with a runaway boy from Illinois in order to save face for public appearances. When Christine Collins announced that the runaway boy was most definitely not her son, the LAPD urged her to quote “try him out for a couple of weeks” (Wineville Chicken Coop Murders 1). Christine vehemently denied the LAPD’s claims that the runaway boy was her son. The story was quickly picking up widespread attention and Christine was committed to the mental ward at the LA County Hospital by orders of the police department. Her sentence was on the rather questionable terms that she was an inconvenience This situation also addresses the issue of provided medical proof in order to incarcerate. Because Christine went against the police department and started to attract public observation, not because of mental health complications, the police simply disposed of her to avert attention and bad press away from themselves. This one, individual woman in history is well known due to the news coverage and publicity of the missing child and eventual detainment and execution of the kidnapper (Wineville Chicken Coop Murders 1). 

What about the women who were unknown to the public and had no family or friends to vouch for their innocence? The women, the helpless patients, in Ten Days in a Mad-House were alone and had only their own voices to defend themselves with. This trait possessed little to no value because the women were not listened to nor taken seriously by the doctors and staff (Bly 281-297). When Christine Collins was thrown into a mental ward by the police to simply “shut her up,” it invalidated every single case admitted into that mental institution because if her case had no validity, did any of them? If Collins was admitted into a mental facility, how many other women were forced there under the same circumstances? No medical reasoning was provided for the incarceration of Christine Collins, which brings the question, did any of the women in that mental institution rightfully belong there (Wineville Chicken Coop Murders 1)?

The way that women were treated inside the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island was horrifying and disturbing. Women were stripped of their personal belongings, forced into insufficient clothing and psychically and emotionally abused. They were ill-equipped to live moderately comfortable in harsh weather conditions, and when requesting sufficient clothing they were firmly denied. These services, as unhelpful and insufficient as they were, were free of charge to the patients and their families. Compared to asylums in a relative time period that required payment for admission, the horrifying behaviors of the doctor, nurses, and staff in Ten Days in a Mad-House were not “the norm” in mental health facilities. For example, a French asylum founded by Dr. Brierre de Boismont supplied game-rooms, gardens, and luxury food (Hewitt 111), a polar opposite experience compared to Bly’s. Although the asylum on Blackwell’s Island’s facility and the provided food and clothing were free of charge, it was aggressively referenced by the nurses as “charity” (Bly 287). The women’s needs were not being properly met, and they were not treated humanely, cut and dry. 

Although the services of the mental health institution were of no cost to the patients on Blackwell’s Island (Bly 287), they were incomparable to those which required hefty sums of money to attend like Dr. Brieere de Boismont’s facilities (Hewitt 1). Dr. Brieere’s method of treatment was polar opposite to that of the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island. While the Women’s Lunatic Asylum’s nurses made the patients clean and sit idly for long hours in the day, “Alexandre Brierre de Boismont and his family lived alongside their patients and integrated them into the household routine in hopes that this would encourage those deemed insane to return to rationality” (Hewitt 1). The treatment in which Nellie Bly received varied greatly from the treatment plan implemented by de Boismont. The contrast between the two treatment plans indicated how positive medical treatment, like de Boismont’s, produces positive results, unlike the negative conditions inside Blackwell’s Island.  The mental state of the women after they had experienced the conditions placed upon them by medical officials in a detrimental environment deteriorated rather than getting healthier with the proper treatment. This applied whether the women were medically “insane” or not, like Bly in Blackwell’s Island. 

Bly exhibits this idea through her nerve-wracking experience inside the institution: “ . . . 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. Two months would make her a mental and physical wreck” (Bly 293). This treatment imposed upon a perfectly healthy, average woman would eventually take its toll. The specific treatment on Blackwell’s Island influenced a young and healthy woman like Nellie Bly in a way that she would eventually say, “I would have liked to put above the gates that open to the asylum, ‘He who enters here leave hope behind’” (292). This is an example of a woman with a healthy mind prior to entering a mental facility and leaving with an altered, negative mindset due to the inappropriate conduct of the physicians and extremely poor living conditions.  

Bly clearly answers the question of “if and when women were medically needed to be placed in a mental health facility to receive necessary treatment, were their needs being met and were they being treated humanely?” with the answer “no”. Bly’s personal encounters and her experience throughout her undercover work provided a looking glass into the treatment of women in a public facility. In the chance that a woman truly needed to be committed to an institution for further medical treatment to seek improvement, she would most likely not be treated in a way that would help her in progressing to a healthier state of life. 
