In 1887 a 23 year old journalist named Elizabeth Cochran walked into a New York boarding house, convinced the other residents that she was acting strangely, and got herself committed to the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island in New York City.
She was not insane. She was a reporter working for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. Her editor had given her a straightforward assignment. Get inside the asylum and report what you find.
What she found changed American mental health policy.
What She Did to Get In
Nellie Bly, the pen name she wrote under, spent days practicing a blank stare and erratic behavior in her mirror before presenting herself at the boarding house. She convinced the other residents and the doctor who examined her that she was genuinely disturbed. She was taken to court, examined by a judge, and committed.
Multiple doctors examined her before she was admitted to Blackwell's Island. None of them identified her as sane. The ease with which she moved through the system and ended up institutionalized against her will told its own story about how little it actually took to be locked away in 1887.
What She Found Inside
The conditions at Blackwell's Island were brutal. Patients were given rotten food, cold baths administered as punishment, and physical abuse from attendants. Women who entered the institution not mentally ill were driven toward genuine breakdown by the conditions they were subjected to.
Bly interviewed other patients and found women who had been committed for being too spirited, for speaking a foreign language, or simply for being poor and inconvenient to someone with the ability to have them removed.
She spent ten days inside before her editor arranged her release. She then wrote a series of articles for the World that were collected into a book called Ten Days in a Mad-House.
The public reaction was immediate and significant. A grand jury investigation was launched. The Department of Public Charities and Corrections increased its budget for the care of the insane by over a million dollars. Conditions at Blackwell's Island and other similar institutions were reviewed and reformed.
Nellie Bly's reporting did not fix the entire American mental health system. Problems persisted for decades. But her willingness to put herself inside the story and report what she experienced firsthand produced results that no amount of outside criticism had achieved.
She was 23 years old.
She went on to circle the globe in 72 days, beating the record set by the fictional Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne's novel. She spent her career doing things women were told they could not do and reporting stories people in power preferred to keep quiet.
Her name belongs in the history of American journalism much more prominently than it currently occupies.
Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.
