The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease PDF

Rating: Author: Jonathan Metzl ISBN : Product Detai New from Format: PDF

Download for free medical books PRETITLE The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease [Kindle Edition] POSTTITLE from mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link A powerful account of how cultural anxieties about race shaped American notions of mental illness

The civil rights era is largely remembered as a time of sit-ins, boycotts, and riots. But a very different civil rights history evolved at the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ionia, Michigan. 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 protesters at Ionia—for political reasons as well as clinical ones. Expertly sifting through a vast array of cultural documents, Metzl shows how associations between schizophrenia and blackness emerged during the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s—and he provides a cautionary tale of how anxieties about race continue to impact doctor-patient interactions in our seemingly postracial America.


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• File Size: 2960 KB
• Print Length: 272 pages
• Publisher: Beacon Press; 1 edition (January 1, 2010)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B0038OM3L4
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
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• Lending: Not Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #451,180 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease PDF

As you probably know, African American men are disproportionately diagnosed with schizophrenia. But what you may not know is when this pattern emerged, or why. The Protest Psychosis tells that story.

Up until the 1950s, the overwhelming majority of those diagnosed with schizophrenia were white. They were the delicate or eccentric -- poets, academics, middle-class women like Alice Wilson in The Protest Psychosis, "driven to insanity by the dual pressures of housework and motherhood."

Then, in the mid-1960s, the Long Hot Summers hit urban America. Smoldering anger over racism and poverty erupted into rioting, fires, and harsh repression. In Detroit, a police raid on a party triggered an uprising that left 43 dead, 1,189 injured, and more than 7,000 arrested. Convinced that they would never win civil rights through sit-down strikes, a nascent Black Power movement became increasingly militant.

Coincidentally, just as this urban unrest was reaching its zenith, the American Psychiatric Association was busy revising its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Published in 1968, the DSM-II was touted as a more objective and scientific document than its 1952 predecessor.

"However, the DSM-II was far from the objective, universal text that its authors envisioned," writes Metzl. "In unintentional and unexpected ways, the manual's diagnostic criteria -- and the criteria for schizophrenia most centrally -- reflected the social tensions of 1960s America. A diagnostic text meant to shift focus away from the specifics of culture instead became inexorably intertwined with the cultural politics, and above all the race politics, of a particular nation and a particular moment in time.