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Mab Segrest. Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum. New York: The New Press, 2020. xviii + 396 pp. $28.99 cloth.
From the first years of my long tenure at Georgia College, through several institutional name changes, I witnessed the machinations of the head of the Psychology Department, an older woman whose genteel demeanor concealed an opinionated and outspoken personality. Because of the college's proximity to Central State Hospital, this psychologist, as she called herself, sometimes referred to Central State Hospital students who had confided their homosexuality to her for help in ridding themselves of this "affliction." Several students in the seventies reported to me that they had so confessed and subsequently experienced her appalling interference.
This same professor lived so close to the college that she established a bed and breakfast in her home for visitors to the campus, quite a few of whom were visiting scholars working in the Flannery O'Connor Collection in Russell Library. In the late seventies and eighties when Sally Fitzgerald began to visit Milledgeville to work on O'Connor's letters and, later, on an authorized biography, she discovered-much to her dismay-that the above mentioned psychologist was routinely informing her visitors that Flannery O'Connor was "crazy" and should have been treated in the local asylum. O'Connor's fiction, she pronounced, was the product of severe mental disturbance. As perhaps only Sally Fitzgerald would, she arranged a visit with the professor and, as we say down South, gave her a piece of her mind. To my knowledge, the ludicrous armchair diagnosis ceased from that day forward.
Central State Hospital has ever lurked on the edges of socially acceptable Milledgeville life, as the subject of embarrassment, hilarity, distress, and defensiveness- to say nothing of its long contributions (until 2010) to the town's economy. Like many of us college students enrolled in introductory psychology classes in the mid-twentieth century, O'Connor probably toured the hospital during her time at GSCW. This onsite experience, while carefully controlled and ostensibly academic, was intended to allow students to witness the real work of psychology.
Mab Segrest's investigation into the history of Central State Hospital, originally known as Georgia State Lunatic, Idiot, and Epileptic Asylum, is an invaluable esposé of the curious and...