"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 morphine as necessary. But these remedies are unreliable, and those closest to the doctor are impatient for change.

A dual coming-of-age story, Moral Treatment vividly imagines a moment of idealism, crisis, and transition in mental health care in the United States.