The Land of the Mad | Podcast Review

Back in the 1970s, children in Girifalco, Calabria, would play soccer inside the town's psychiatric hospital because the field there "had goals"—and the nun gave them snacks afterward. Those children were raised by their parents not to call the patients "mad," even when they saw them leaving to visit the bar, catch a film, or stop by someone's home for a cigarette or coffee. Beyond the horrifying stories of institutionalization driven more by poverty than actual psychosis, beyond the devastating "treatments" and the alienist and Lombrosian psychological theories we're not sure we've truly left behind, the many voices in this accessible podcast tell an important piece of our national history and present: they trace glimpses of early twentieth-century innovation in open-door systems alongside the contradictory yet vital economic opportunities that something like Fiat offered the working South.