Moral Treatment - by Stephanie Carpenter (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"Pubescent insanity." In 1889, this is the diagnosis given to Amy Underwood, a seventeen-year-old with a history of erratic behavior. After her exhausted parents commit her to a northern Michigan psychiatric hospital, Amy must fend for herself among patients and doctors whose motives she doesn't understand. But as she adapts to the hospital, she grasps her predicament. She will either be "cured" and sent back to her parents' stifling home-or she'll become a chronic patient, cut off from the outside world. Can she find another path forward?

The asylum's aging superintendent, "the doctor," oversees every aspect of the growing hospital...or so he thinks. A long-time practitioner of the moral treatment, he believes the insane can be cured with good food, sufficient rest, wholesome influences-and morphine as necessary. But these remedies are unreliable, and those closest to the doctor are impatient for change.

A dual coming-of-age story, Moral Treatment vividly imagines a moment of idealism, crisis, and transition in mental health care in the United States.

Review Quotes

"Troubled young girls abused and inclined to self-harm, families and adult 'institutions' too often powerless to save them-these are as relevant today as in the nineteenth century of Stephanie Carpenter's clear-eyed yet compassionate novel. The dangers have changed; the damage is all too familiar."

-Eric Torgersen, contest judge and author of In Which We See Our Selves: American Ghazals

"Moral Treatment is a triumph of high-resolution seeing: of the past in all its particulars, rendered here with stunning richness and depth; of various ideas about mental illness and what those ideas have cost; and, most effectively of all, of how the vantage point changes the view.... A marvelous achievement."

-Clare Beams, author of The Garden and The Illness Lesson

"In this brilliant work of historical fiction, the reader is introduced to a time and place through the lives of two magical and haunting characters. The novel, in texture and atmosphere,

is so fully realized that the reader forgets both 'historical' and 'fiction' while dwelling in its pages. The social and the personal, the sensual and the psychological, meet here."

-Laura Kasischke, author of Eden Springs and Mind of Winter