Today–April 4–in 1802, the subject of my first biography–Dorothea Lynde Dix was born. Having grown up on the grounds of a state mental hospital where my father was a psychiatrist, it’s not surprising that I was drawn to write Breaking the Chains: The Crusade of Dorothea Lynde Dix, about Dix’s pioneering forty-year crusade for humane treatment of people with mental illness; a crusade she lead throughout America and took abroad from Scotland to Russia. “It is time,” Dix declared, “that people should have learnt that to be insane is not to be disgraced; that sickness is not to be ranked with crime.”
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