Sane Woman Describes Her Experiences in Insane Asylum

1905

"Ordeals There Would Drive Any One Crazy"

NEW YORK, Dec 2. — "The best way to make a sane person demented is to send him or her to a lunatic asylum. It is death in life. Men and women with staring eyes look into yours and despite your certainty that your sanity is perfect, you suffer one of the most horrible sensations that a human being can have — you feel that the men who are watching you believe that behind your eyes lies the same distortion of intellect that is harbored by the heads which wag from side to side around you."

Mrs. Sara Dean Reid, bride of Capt. Albert Dean Reid, who is in the Tombs on a charge of bigamy, talked thus last night in Mount Vernon about her nerve-wrecking experience as an inmate of Bloomingdale Insane Asylum, from which she was released by order of Judge Platt, who, at the demand of her counsel, John M. Digney, had her sanity investigated. Mrs. Reid was placed in the institution at the request of her three brothers a few days after her marriage. The woman is heiress to a large estate.

"The most vivid imagination cannot conceive," said Mrs. Reid, "the horrors of an insane asylum. I felt as one might feel if suddenly transferred to another planet. Everything was strange. The voices were not human, the glances were full of terror, the treatment was brusque, and the life so mechanical and circumscribed that I am astonished I was not driven crazy myself.

"The one thing that helped me to fight off the impulse to shriek as the unfortunates around me did was writing. Day by day since a year ago I have jotted down my impressions of the awful place, and I shall some time publish a book on the subject.

"An insane asylum spells monotony. You rise in the morning, bathe, eat, walk, and, after the hours have worked themselves out with the dreariness of the ticking of a clock, you go to bed again while all around are mental wrecks. You cannot sleep. You never lose the consciousness that you are sane among the insane, that mad people who may at any moment rend the air with shrieks that will kill the slumbers you woo are almost within arm's reach.

"I was treated by the attendants just as if I were really insane. They watched me constantly. I could walk nowhere without having eyes following me. I could not go out without having two nurses, grim and reticent.

"About seventy insane people were in the ward to which I was assigned. There were all manner of lunatics, and when I tried to sleep at night the babble of their incoherent, senseless voices awakened me with a start.

"There is one prayer I have added to those I learned in childhood, and it is 'God keep the sane from the asylums.' "

Mrs. Reid will not return to her brothers. She has decided to live at Mamaroneck, for a time, as the guest of the Rev F. F. Gerran, rector of St. Thomas' Episcopal Church.