On Nellie Bly and Her Mad-House: Getting yourself committed to an insane asylum (on purpose) is no easy task. But as an investigative journalist, Nellie Bly had to get the scoop on what was happening at the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Roosevelt Island in New York City. The year was 1887, and Bly had recently left her job at the Pittsburgh Dispatch to work for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. And as one of her first assignments, she went undercover to expose the dark underbelly of American lunatic asylums. Bly faked insanity while living at a women's boardinghouse. Having been examined by a psychiatrist, they committed her to the asylum. While there, she experienced the wretched conditions of asylum life firsthand. Many of the patients were actually sane immigrants, but they simply could not speak English. Clean clothes and edible food were hard to find, and torture (sitting on straight-back benches, wearing straight-jackets, etc.) seemed to be the only daily activity. The newspaper got Bly released after ten days, and she later published a book about her findings.
