Participant Observation at a New York City Lunatic Asylum
It’s 1887 Nellie Bly, a 23 year old reporter for the New York World newspaper, bluffs her way into a notorious mental institution. Her mission is to expose the terrible conditions for patients living at Blackwell’s Island — now Roosevelt Island — a tiny piece of land in New York’s East River between Manhattan and the borough of Queens.
Her approach was to fully immerse herself in their world just as an ethnographer studying a group of people would do. To gain undercover access, Bly checked herself in to a room at a boarding house for destitute women. She did such a good job of feigning insanity that she was soon taken for a medical examination. Deemed “positively demented” at the assessment, she found herself an inmate of Blackwells alongside 1,600 other women.
Bly is now credited with being at the forefront of investigative journalism. What she didn’t know then was she was also doing a form of participant observation — a term later popularized by Anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, and later by the urban research department of the Chicago School of sociology.
Once inside the asylum she was exposed to everything the women were experiencing. She endured the freezing cold baths, horrific food and sanitary conditions, and witnessed routine violence on patients from staff.
According to her accounts Bly made a point of talking to as many women as she could. She lived side-by-side with women who were suicidal, violent and psychotic, as well as perfectly sane women who were mistakenly confined to the institution. Among the sane ones, she found that many were immigrants who didn’t understand English and seemed to have been mistakenly committed to the island. Others were just poor and thought they were going to a poorhouse, not an insane asylum, she wrote. All related horrible stories of neglect and heartless cruelty.
“A pretty young Hebrew woman spoke so little English I could not get her story except as told by the nurses. They said her name is Sarah Fishbaum, and that her husband put her in the asylum because she had a fondness for other men than himself.”
The results of working in this way meant she got more out of the experience than any journalist or hospital inspector would have done at the time. Instead of interviewing doctors and patients, poring over reports and data, or arranging visits to the hospital to observe conditions where no doubt the horrors would have been covered up, Bly instead put herself in the patient’s shoes.
By ‘being there’ and using a participant observational approach she understood from the inside out what the day-to-day conditions were like for women and she could then accurately convey it back to people on the outside looking in.
Two days later, on Oct. 9, 1887, the New York World printed the first part of Bly’s two-part illustrated series “Behind Asylum Bars,” on the front page of the Sunday feature section. It was an overnight sensation and not only propelled Bly to become one of the most famous journalists in America but led to sweeping changes at the hospital. Within a month of her reports, better living and sanitary conditions were introduced along with more nutritious meals for the patients. Many of the abusive staff were sacked and replaced, and translators were put in place for migrant patients.
“I always had a desire to know asylum life more thoroughly — a desire to be convinced that the most helpless of God’s creatures, the insane, were cared for kindly and properly,” Bly wrote afterwards. While participant observation taught her that they were not, it ultimately led to a shift in understanding the reality of patients on the ward, huge improvements for vulnerable women at Blackwells and all those who came afterwards.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronis%C5%82aw_Malinowski
https://www.biography.com/news/inside-nelly-bly-10-days-madhouse
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/women/nellie-bly-mental-health-insane-asylum-a9026906.html
