“The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease“
Psychiatrist and cultural critic Jonathan M. Metzl, MD, PhD explores the surprising, compelling, and often terrifying story of the misdiagnosis of schizophrenia in African American men.
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 from a much wider set of cultural shifts that defined the thoughts, actions, and even the politics of black men as being inherently insane.
Dr. Metzl is Frederick B. Rentschler II Chair of Sociology and Medicine, Health, and Society and is Director of the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University.
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