Author Description

After trying to commit suicide and giving laudanum to her young son, Anna Agnew was committed to the Indiana Hospital for the Insane (later Central State Hospital), where she would spend the next seven years.In FROM UNDER THE CLOUD, Agnew describes her experiences in the asylum, her delusions and thoughts of suicide, the cruelty of untrained attendants, the abuse of mechanical restraints, her estrangement from her husband and children, and the need for reform in the psychiatric hospitals of her day.A bestseller in her day, Anna Agnew's autobiography gives us a glimpse of how mental illness was seen and treated during the late nineteenth century.