This talk focus on how these modern-day American conceptualizations of schizophrenic patients as violent emerged during the civil-rights era of the 1950s-1970s in response to a larger set of conversations about race. It integrates institutional, professional, and cultural discourses in order to trace shifts in popular and medical understandings of schizophrenia from a disease of white docility to one of “Negro” hostility, and from a disease that was nurtured to one that was feared.
The first section tracks the medicalization of race and schizophrenia within a particular institution, the Ionia Hospital for the Criminally Insane. The talk’s second section contextualizes the Ionia case histories within shifting psychiatric definitions of schizophrenia. We will explore the ways in which published case studies explicitly connected clinical presentations of African-American men with the politics of the civil rights movement in ways that treated aspirations for liberation and civil rights as symptoms of mental illness.
Finally, the third section reads shifts in psychiatric nosology within changing American cultural concerns about black masculinity. Triangulating the historical connections between institutional forces, psychiatric practices, and civil-rights politics helps me grapple with some of the seemingly naturalized characteristics of present-day schizophrenia discourse—characteristics that often appear denatured of their explicit connections to race. These include cultural tropes of angry, homeless mentally ill persons, or findings demonstrating that persons with schizophrenia reside in prisons far more often than in psychiatric care facilities.
Jonathan M. Metzl, MD, PhD, is based at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee where he is Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor of Sociology and Medicine, Health and Society; the Director of the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society; and Professor of Psychiatry. His most recent publication is Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland (2019).
The Politics of Kleinian Technique in Post-war UK - Barry Watt
Filming the Body in Crisis
Art and Mourning: The role of creativity in healing trauma and loss
Art and Mourning: The role of creativity in healing trauma and loss
Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind
Translating Anzieu - Professor Naomi Segal
Confronting the Catacomb Saints: Death & the Camera in Palermo
Makers and scribblers: explorers of desire, fear and everything in between
Intimacy Unguarded: Gender, the Unconscious and Contemporary Art
Intimacy Unguarded: Gender, the Unconscious and Contemporary Art
Intimacy Unguarded: Gender, the Unconscious and Contemporary Art
Karl Abraham: Life and Work, a Biography
Psychotherapy and Biography: Unnatural Bedfellows?
Conference: The Effectiveness of Symbols
Conference: The Effectiveness of Symbols
Conference: The Effectiveness of Symbols
Conference: The Effectiveness of Symbols
Conference: The Effectiveness of Symbols
Yom Kippur 1939: The Last Day of Freud's Life and its Immediate Aftermath
Psychoanalytic Poetry Festival 2015: The Creative Unconscious
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Heal, Survive & Thrive!
Summarize | رادیو سامرایز
LifeBlood
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Mel Robbins Podcast