Asylum Ways of Seeing

"[A] unique history of patient cultures in 20th century America...Read as an interweaving of stories, events, and perspectives over historical time, [Asylum Ways of Seeing] offers the reader immersion in the complex intricacies of individual and collective human agency and its often unpredictable and irreversible consequences. Heather Murray is a masterful guide, who provides a wonderfully varied collection of perspectives that constantly challenges readers to expand and consider alternative ways of understanding the historical and personal stories she relates."—Journal of the History of Behavioral Science

"[A] carefully argued and meticulously documented exercise in intellectual and cultural history, a reconstruction of what [Murray] calls 'patient cultures,' which she understands as the sensibilities and emotional lives of psychiatry’s twentieth-century subjects as they were shaped by institutions that both offered respite and served as sites of oppression. It is admirably attentive to nuance, human frailty, and individuals’ shortcomings."—American Literary History

""Highly recommended...Murray explores the somewhat unusual premise that asylums and other residential psychiatric institutions can be places of citizenship that prompt the development of different (i.e., alternative) versions of culture...This is an illuminating read with powerful implications for those working in such facilities, and a must read for anyone who is either advocating for or treating residents of such facilities today."—Choice