Stephanie Carpenter presents Moral Treatment

Inaugural winner of the Summit Series Prize from Central Michigan University Press, Moral Treatment vividly imagines a moment of idealism, crisis, and transition in mental health care in the United States.

"Pubescent insanity." In 1889, this is the diagnosis given to Amy Underwood, a seventeen-year-old with a history of erratic behavior. After her exhausted parents commit her to a northern Michigan psychiatric hospital, Amy must fend for herself among patients and doctors whose motives she doesn't understand. But as she adapts to the hospital, she grasps her predicament. She will either be "cured" and sent back to her parents' stifling home-or she'll become a chronic patient, cut off from the outside world. Can she find another path forward?

The asylum's aging superintendent, "the doctor," oversees every aspect of the growing hospital...or so he thinks. A long-time practitioner of the moral treatment, he believes the insane can be cured with good food, sufficient rest, wholesome influences-and Morph*ne as necessary. But these remedies are unreliable, and those closest to the doctor are impatient for change.

Told in the intersecting voices of doctor and patient, Moral Treatment is literary historical fiction at its finest: elegantly written, moving, relevant, and unforgettable.

A native of Traverse City, Michigan, Stephanie Carpenter spent her youth exploring the then-vacant State Hospital that inspired Moral Treatment. Stephanie’s collection of stories, Missing Persons, won the Press 53 Award in Short Fiction and was published in 2017. Her work has appeared in Copper Nickel, Ecotone, The Missouri Review, Nimrod, Witness, and other journals. She’s Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at Michigan Technological University, in the Upper Peninsula.

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