Ten Days In A Mad-House

Content Warning: This section discusses violence and abusive behavior toward, and mistreatment of, women and people with disabilities and mental health conditions.

In Ten Days in a Mad-House, Nellie Bly illustrates the deep-seated mistreatment of mentally ill individuals through describing her undercover experience in Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum. Rather than offering medical and psychological support, the institution dehumanized and neglected the women in its care, exposing the failings of a system that prioritized containment over healing. 

Bly’s investigation, filled with harrowing details of deprivation and brutality, reveals how society’s disregard for mental health fostered neglect and violence within institutional walls. The asylum’s staff, undertrained and often indifferent, embodied this systemic failure. For instance, Bly describes how Dr. Dent, the asylum’s superintendent, acknowledged that “he had no means by which to tell positively if the bath was cold and of the number of women put into the same water” (96), highlighting the complete absence of oversight and care.

Bly’s observations show that the asylum’s bureaucratic structure enabled staff to mistreat patients without accountability. The doctors, often dismissive, spent little time with the women, relegating medical care to superficial examinations.