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How Schizophrenia Became A Black Disease
Beacon Press
January 2010
On Sale: January 1, 2010
288 pages
ISBN: 0807085928
EAN: 9780807085929
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Revolution was in the air in the 1960s. Civil rights
protests demanded attention on the airwaves and in the
streets. Anger gave way to revolt, and revolt provided the
elusive promise of actual change. But a very different civil
rights history evolved at the Ionia State Hospital for the
Criminally Insane in Ionia, Michigan. Here, far from the
national glare of sit-ins, boycotts, or riots, African
American men suddenly appeared in the asylum’s previously
white, locked wards. Some of these men came to the attention
of the state after participating in civil rights
demonstrations, while others were sent by the military, the
penal system, or the police. Though many of the men hailed
from Detroit, ambulances and paddy wagons brought men from
other urban centers as well. Once at Ionia, psychiatrists
classified these men under a single diagnosis:
schizophrenia. In The Protest
Psychosis, psychiatrist and cultural critic Jonathan
Metzl tells the shocking story of how schizophrenia became
the diagnostic term overwhelmingly applied to African
American men at the Ionia State Hospital, and how events at
Ionia mirrored national conversations that increasingly
linked blackness, madness, and civil rights. Expertly
sifting through a vast array of cultural documents—from
scientific literature, to music lyrics, to riveting, tragic
hospital charts—Metzl shows how associations between
schizophrenia and blackness emerged during the 1960s and
1970s in ways that directly reflected national political
events. As he demonstrates, far from resulting from the
racist intentions of individual doctors or the symptoms of
specific patients, racialized schizophrenia grew froma much
wider set of cultural shifts that defined the thoughts,
actions, and even the politics of black men as being
inherently insane. Ultimately, The
Protest Psychosis provides a cautionary tale of how
anxieties about race continue to impact doctor-patient
interactions, even during our current, seemingly post-race
era of genetics, pharmacokinetics, and brain scans.
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