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Moral Treatment
Inaugural winner of the Summit Series Prize from Central Michigan University Press
In 1889, seventeen-year-old Amy Underwood is committed to a psychiatric hospital in northern Michigan. Feeling abandoned by her loved ones, she finds solace in her friendship with a spirited fellow patient, Letitia. Yet as Amy becomes more comfortable at the hospital, she faces a troubling reality: not everyone will leave this place.
The hospital’s aging superintendent, the doctor, believes in the principles of the moral treatment: that an orderly environment, healthy diet, exercise, and uplifting activities will restore mental health. But as the hospital’s population swells, the doctor’s control slips—and those closest to him clamor for change. In this dual coming-of-age story, as Amy grows in self-awareness, the doctor is forced to reexamine his long-standing professional and personal practices.
Inaugural winner of the Summit Series Prize from Central Michigan University Press, MORAL TREATMENT is literary historical fiction at its finest: elegantly written, moving, relevant, and unforgettable.
More about Moral Treatment
ARTICLES
If My Book at Monkeybicycle
Novel Playlist at Largehearted Boy
Research Notes at Necessary Fiction
Guest essay at Reading the Past
Excerpt at Women Writers, Women’s Books
INTERVIEWS
Interview with Copper Nickel
Featured in the Lansing City Pulse
Interview with April Baer on Michigan Public’s Stateside
Interview with Terry Shepherd
Art Beat interview with WMUK’s Zinta Aistars
Interview with Interlochen Public Radio
Book Q&A with Deborah Kalb
Author2Author interview with Bill Kenower, EiC, Author magazine
REVIEWS
“Moral Treatment … vividly recreates one late-19th-century year of [the hospital’s] existence…. The dynamic between the staff members and their patients is particularly complex and convincing.” –Alida Becker, NEW YORK TIMES
“… evocative…. Carpenter maintains a hazy boundary between what’s actually occurred and what the characters have only imagined, inviting readers to draw their own conclusions. Along the way, Carpenter holds the reader’s attention with thorough descriptions of the asylum and the characters’ period-specific sensibilities.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“[a] carefully detailed, subtly observed novel…. affecting …”
—KIRKUS REVIEWS
“… compelling…. With luminous complexity, the affecting novel Moral Treatment recounts an era of progressive advancements and clinical abominations in American mental health care.”
—FOREWORD REVIEWS
“The novel presents a number of nuanced and compelling mysteries.… Do the doctors mean well? Are the women truly ill, or are they being made that way by the forced hospitalization? … While the reader is able to see inside the minds of many different characters, none has the full picture.” –WASHINGTON INDEPENDENT REVIEW OF BOOKS
“[the novel] covers considerable ground—a reflection perhaps of the immense complexities of the human mind.… I found myself deeply invested in Amy’s troubled life and wanted closure for her.” —Fiona Alison, HISTORICAL NOVEL SOCIETY
PRAISE
“By showing us the same hospital through the eyes of its superintendent and a young patient, this novel powerfully demonstrates the vast distance between theory and reality: yet I also felt moved by these two characters’ similar searching for true understanding of the world. A marvelous achievement.”
—CLARE BEAMS, author of The Garden and The Illness Lesson
“…[a story] as relevant today as in the 19th century …clear-eyed yet compassionate.”
—ERIC TORGERSEN, contest judge and author of In Which We See Our Selves: American Ghazals
“…brilliant…. so fully realized that the reader forgets both ‘historical’ and ‘fiction’ while dwelling in these pages….”
—LAURA KASISCHKE, author of Eden Springs and Mind of Winter
Stephanie Carpenter 