A woman in the 19th century behaves “scandalously,” so she’s removed from her regular social circles. She’s quarantined, because she’s deemed a threat to society. She’s allowed only severely restricted access to friends and family, and the people who care for her needs are trained to be dispassionate and treat her in a way that will foster docility and compliance.
She experiences extended periods of boredom, because there are few intellectual activities available. She’s forced to be alone and in silence and seclusion.
These circumstances only exacerbate her already fragile mental state.
The scenario was presented by Jessica Walker Nash, a student in Campbell University’s Second Chance Initiative, at the 2026 Incarcerated Scholars Conference, an annual virtual academic conference that amplifies the voices of incarcerated scholars, graduates and artists. Nash is in year 19 of an at least 22-year prison sentence at Anson Correctional Institute, and the beginning of her presentation could very well mirror the life of a woman in her situation.
But her story was about the Rest Cure treatment practiced by several physicians for women with mental health issues in the 1800s. Nash’s presentation — “Women Resisting A Rest: Recognizing the Need for Intellectual Stimuli in Women’s Prisons by Comparing Modern-Day Female Incarceration with the Rest Cure as Seen Through the Lens of Charlotte Perki” — analyzed Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” short story that appeared in The New England Magazine in 1892.
For the conference, now in its third year, Nash drew parallels between Rest Cure, Gilman’s story and the experiences of today’s incarcerated women, examining the “consequences of intellectual isolation and unequal access” to educational, vocational and mental health programming.
Nash and classmate Melissa Labrador became the first Campbell students to present in the national conference. Labrador’s artwork, “The Tree of Wisdom” — a mixed media work about passing on knowledge — was part of a virtual gallery shown on Day 1 of the event.
Nash said during her time in Campbell’s Second Chance Initiative, she’s focused on women’s incarceration and its effects on mental health.
“Having been incarcerated myself for 19 years now, I’ve seen a myriad of ways in which the system we now have isn’t working,” she said. “And I especially want to speak on behalf of female inmates. Because our numbers are so small compared to men. We are all too often an afterthought in the prison system. My dream is one day, when I’m released, I will go to law school, take my formal education and use it in conjunction with my lived experience to promote change within the criminal justice system.”
In her research on Rest Cure, Nash introduced the popular diagnosis for women experiencing mental illnesses in the 19th century — “female frailty,” or “hysteria.” She said Dr. Silas Ware Mitchell introduced the idea of Rest Cure to “heal” hysteria — the treatment plan called for complete rest, isolation and a specific diet to help restore health.
“But it also denied the patient any sort of mentally stimulating activity,” Nash said. “The punitive quality of the Rest Cure, which endeavored to produce docility and compliance rather than actually focusing on recuperation, has been well documented in scholarship. That it imposed a veritable state of infantilization on adult patients was a point of comparison that the doctor actually welcomed. Mitchell referred to it as a ‘bitter medicine.’”
Gilman was a patient of Mitchell’s after giving birth to her daughter. She was mentally exhausted and couldn’t care for herself or the baby. Her diagnosis then was hysteria — today it’s known as post-partum depression.
“After enduring the cure, living with little to no intellectual pursuits, she found that her sanity was dwindling by the day,” Nash said. “So, she tossed his orders to the wind, and she went back to living as she pleased.”
She used that experience for her story, “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper” — Nash said she formatted it like a “secret diary.” In the story, the wallpaper represents prison bars.
“Studies show that over 80 percent of incarcerated women meet the criteria for one or more chronic mental disorders, and that the majority of incarcerated women had mental illness prior to incarceration,” Nash said. “Similarly, inmates who are housed in higher-level custody positions are 31 percent more likely to be returned to custody compared to those incarcerated in minimum security facilities.”
She cited a 2022 research article that looked into the “suppressive nature of prisons,” specifically, the inactive environment and the fact that the brain has little to think about and few choices to make.
“The authors of the study suggest that these features hinder cognitive processes and reduce the application and development of executive functions, which include critical thinking, working memory, self-regulation, impulse control and attention span,” Nash said. “Their findings suggested that the prison environment may further impair these functions, resulting in a diminished capacity for inmates to think critically and make improved decisions. Consequently, they found that the prison environments themselves may contribute to an increased likelihood of recidivism upon release.”
Nash said programs like the Second Chance Initiative are important to battling these conditions. She pointed to studies that show staying productive with schoolwork or groups that focus on mental health enable incarcerated women to think critically and hold themselves more accountable for their actions. They also help them prepare to re-enter society.
“Going through the difficulties of schoolwork as a group is significant for incarcerated women, because it enables them to develop personal wellness through group interaction,” Nash said. “We see this as building character, confidence and self-agency. Also, by becoming part of a group striving to reach a common goal, incarcerated women can learn to trust themselves and others at the same time. And all of these benefits are influential in reducing recidivism.”