ENGLISH

The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease

By Jonathan M. Metzl

Book information

Year
2010
ISBN
0807085928, 9780807085929
LCC
RC451.5.N4 .M48 2009
Open Library ID
OL23223434M
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
3 MB (2813754 bytes)
Edition
1
Pages
272\273
Topic
Medicine Diseases
Time added
2011-06-04 13:46:07

Description

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.From the Trade Paperback edition.

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