Nelly Bly, the muck raker in the mad house.
23 year old Nelly Bly - muckraking journalist.
Nelly Bly was born just before the Civil War in Pennsylvania, 1864, in a time when women were still supposed to just look pretty. They were supposed to get married and have babies.
Not Nelly. She worked as a journalist for the newspaper The New York World, and in 1887, Bly pretended to go insane so she could investigate Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum. She was just 23 years old.
By pretending to be insane, Bly exposed the terrible treatment of mentally ill patients.
Staff either ignored patients or abused them - beating them and pouring icy water on them. They didn’t bother treating patients; they were stripped naked and fed rotten food.
It took the first muck raking journalist, Nelly Bly, to shine a light on this psychiatric asylum.
She got herself checked into the insane asylum.… and then couldn’t get out!
Patients were stripped naked and had freezing water poured on them; they ate rotten food, and they were beaten rather than treated.
Bly was only released from the asylum when lawyers from her newspaper, The New York World, stepped in to help her. (The asylum refused to believe she wasn’t actually mad!)
Her newspaper articles on Blackwell Asylum led to changes in mental health care and showed the need for compassion and treatment - instead of punishment.
Nellie Bly also wrote about her experiences in a book, Ten Days in a Mad-House.
Because of Bly’s harrowing and at times dangerous work, the government provided one million more dollars to improve psychiatric institution conditions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_Bly https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/nellie-bly-0
