Musings...

The 2010 Ken Book Award winner is the moving photo-essay volume Asylum: Inside the closed worlds of state mental hospitals, which is available in the recent non-fiction section.

This oversized work captures snapshots of state mental institutions truly frozen in time. As facilities which were build to be cutting edge at the beginning of the 20th century declined and the scope of mental health care evolved, the massive state medical compounds began to close. The structures and the memories of those who lived or worked within them remained. Christopher Payne captures these images of painful history and tormented memory. The images are surreal, eerie, and bleak: massive, brick-strong structures as homes to some of the most frail inmates; the overwhelming size of the crumbling facilities juxtaposed with the absence of any human life. The accompanying text passage by Oliver Sacks gives a brief, though comprehensive, statement on mental health treatment, facilities, and concepts influencing the state funded institutions, but it is the photographs that communicate issues of humanity in care and the revolution that ended this form of care for the mentally ill.

Check out the Asylum book website.

The Ken Book Award is given by the National Alliance on Mental Illness of NYC-Metro, to book raising awareness of mental illness. Past winners have included Jane Pauley, Gary Trudeau, and Wally Lamb.