lO Days in a Madhouse
By Benjamin Halstead
& Britt Hewitt
What makes a person crazy? A crooked grin? An anxious twitch? As Nellie Bly stares at her reflection, she appears to be descending into madness, her face contorting into strange shapes until she doesn’t recognize herself. She makes a scene in court, where the judge deems her “positively demented,” and she’s thrown into the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island in NYC (now known as Roosevelt Island). Now that she’s officially admitted, she lets us in on the truth: she’s the first ever undercover journalist, wearing “crazy” as a costume to get the inside scoop. She decided to go undercover because she’s learned that when you ask questions, you don’t necessarily get the truth - people only tell you what they want you to know. Nellie sets out to show the world what makes a person crazy, reporting about what it’s like to live among the lunatics at the Blackwell Insane Asylum, where it’s every woman for herself. Nellie investigates and finds that her fellow patients aren’t necessarily “crazy” either - they were all institutionalized because of their opinions, their unruliness, and their inability to be controlled properly by a primarily white-male-dominated culture: They are punk-rock.