Offers a carefully researched narrative of the social history of mental illness in the United States, focusing specifically on schizophrenia, the taboos that compromise mental health care, and the way the disease has devastated the author's own family.

The author shares her son Mark Becker's story, from his childhood in Parkersburg, Iowa, through the murder of Ed Thomas and the events that followed, using her family's experiences to demonstrate the need for reform in the existing mental health system.

In Madness, award-winning journalist Antonia Hylton tells the 93-year-old history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day. She blends the intimate tales of patients and employees whose lives were shaped by Crownsville with a decade-worth of investigative research and archival documents. Madness chronicles the stories of Black families whose mental health suffered...