Jonathan M Metzl
Biographic Data
| ID | 354754 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jonathan M Metzl |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jonathan M |
| FAMILY NAME | Metzl |
| SIGNATURE | METZL J M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Vanderbilt University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0037-3953 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 381 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Racializing Covid-19
To what extent have social media discussions of health racialized during the COVID-19 pandemic? How has the spread of racialized social media health content influenced attitudes about race and COVID-19? To answer these questions, we collected data on public US Facebook posts from 2019–2020 related to health and health care (n ≃ 9,659,000) and document a rise in race-related and racist language in online discussions directly-related to health duri…
Rural and nonrural racial variation in mentally unhealthy days
Rural-nonrural health disparities are well documented, yet researchers rarely consider how mental health is experienced across racial groups in rural areas. Black Americans frequently demonstrate better mental health than White Americans, which is puzzling, given their exposure to interpersonal and structural racism and discrimination. To determine if this paradoxical mental health patterning occurs within the context of rurality, we used zero-in…
Toward a moral reckoning on structural racism
The racial reckoning of 2020 involved the largest social movement protest in U.S. history, but support for the Black Lives Matter movement declined shortly after. To advance a moral reckoning on structural racism that dismantles racialized structures and redresses racial inequities, we call on scholar activists within the field of community psychology to realign their own practices by (a) examining structural factors; (b) encouraging structural t…
The Protest Psychosis & the Future of Equity & Diversity Efforts in American Psychiatry
This essay chronicles the history of medical associations between schizophrenia and Blackness that emerged during the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s, when American psychiatrists overdiagnosed schizophrenia in Black men in ways that undermined brain science of the era. I provide data to show how racially disparate diagnostic outcomes resulted not solely from the attitudes or biases of clinicians, but from a series of larger political an…
We grew up in the church
Structural competency and the future of firearm research
In this critical literature review we develop a five-part agenda for pandemic-era research into mass shootings and multiple-victim homicides that promotes understanding the psychologies of individual shooters within larger structures and systems. We show how the momentous events set in motion by the COVID-19 virus, and the structural drivers of inequity and racism that its spread exposed, challenge mental health research on gun trauma to better a…
Repeal the Dickey Amendment to Address Polarization Surrounding Firearms in the United States
An editorial is presented which addresses the author's views about the potential repeal of America's Dickey Amendment from 1996 in order to facilitate epidemiological research on firearm injuries and deaths in the U.S. Mistrust and political polarization are examined, along with public health research, America's gun policies, and the concept of guns as symbols of White authority in the U.S. American gun ownership and the prevention of school shoo…
Using a structural competency framework to teach structural racism in pre-health education
The inclusion of structural competency training in pre-health undergraduate programs may offer significant benefits to future healthcare professionals. This paper presents the results of a comparative study of an interdisciplinary pre-health curriculum based in structural competency with a traditional premedical curriculum. The authors describe the interdisciplinary pre-health curriculum, titled Medicine, Health, and Society (MHS) at Vanderbilt U…
Developing and Evaluating an Innovative Structural Competency Curriculum for Pre-Health Students
The inclusion of structural competency training in pre-health undergraduate programs may offer significant benefits to future healthcare professionals. This paper presents the results of a comparative study of an interdisciplinary pre-health curriculum based in structural competency with a traditional premedical curriculum. The authors describe a new evaluation tool, the Structural Foundations of Health Survey © (2016), developed to evaluate stru…
Metzl Responds
Metzl Responds Affiliation Jonathan Metzl MD, PhDJonathan Metzl is the 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 at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN.CopyRightCorrespondence should be sent to Jonathan M. Metzl, Director, Vanderbilt Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, 2301 Vanderbilt Place, Nashville, TN 372…
The Interdependence of African American Men's Definitions of Manhood and Health
In this article, we explore themes that cut across how 24- to 77-year-old African American men define manhood and health. Utilizing a thematic approach, we analyzed data from 9 focus groups (N = 73). We found that manhood and health were relational constructs that are interrelated in men's minds and experiences. Manhood and health were defined by the characteristics men embody, the behaviors men engage in, and the goals and values men had to posi…
Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms
Four assumptions frequently arise in the aftermath of mass shootings in the United States: (1) that mental illness causes gun violence, (2) that psychiatric diagnosis can predict gun crime, (3) that shootings represent the deranged acts of mentally ill loners, and (4) that gun control “won’t prevent” another Newtown (Connecticut school mass shooting). Each of these statements is certainly true in particular instances. Yet, as we show, notions of …
Structural Competency Meets Structural Racism
Physicians in the United States have long been trained to assess race and ethnicity in the context of clinical interactions.Medical students learn to identify how their patients' "demographic and cultural factors" influence their health behaviors [1].Interns and residents receive "cultural competency" training to help them communicate with persons of differing "ethnic" backgrounds [2].And clinicians are taught to observe the races of their patien…
Structural competency
This paper describes a shift in medical education away from pedagogic approaches to stigma and inequalities that emphasize cross-cultural understandings of individual patients, toward attention to forces that influence health outcomes at levels above individual interactions. It reviews existing structural approaches to stigma and health inequalities developed outside of medicine, and proposes changes to U.S. medical education that will infuse cli…
Mainstream Anxieties about Race in Antipsychotic Drug Ads
Marketing research consistently shows that pharmaceutical advertisements entice patients to ask for particular medications and physicians to prescribe them [1]. How do these advertisements work? Supporters of pharmaceutical advertisements argue that the ads provide patients and doctors with important information about new medications in ways that help both parties make informed treatment decisions [2]. Critics meanwhile contend that pharmaceutica…
Structural Competency
Structural Competency Jonathan M. Metzl (bio) Priscilla Wald's erudite retelling of the Henrietta Lacks story locates individual-level decisions about bodies and cells in the shifting terrain of politics, political economies, and notions of selfhood. Wald takes us on a sweeping tour of philosophical and economic challenges to the idea of "the human" that emerged nodally and communally in the post–World War II period to address the central tension…
Taking Pleasure in Drugs
Book Review| June 01 2011 Taking Pleasure in Drugs Pleasure Consuming Medicine: The Queer Politics of DrugsRace, Kane Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. xvii +257 pp. Jonathan M. Metzl Jonathan M. Metzl Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2011) 17 (2-3): 435–437. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-1163623 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jonathan M. M…
Great Moments
This essay sheds light on present-day pharmaceutical advertisements by looking back to an important early chapter in pharmaceutical company–sponsored promotion: the Great Moments in Medicine and Great Moments in Pharmacy series of commercial paintings produced by Parke, Davis and Company between 1948 and 1964. Beginning in the early 1950s, Parke-Davis delivered reproductions of the Great Moments series to physicians and pharmacies throughout the …
Difference and Identity
Cultural Sutures
Editors' Preface
Editors' Preface:Difference and Identity in Medicine Jonathan M. Metzl (bio) and Suzanne Poirier (bio) Calls from within the field of medicine have asked nurses, doctors, and other health-care workers to become more aware of matters of difference. "[B]ias in health care must be corrected not by medical ombudsmen, or by legislation . . . but by a focus on the individual—individual patients and individual doctors," Abraham Verghese writes in the ar…
Assessing the impact of SSRI antidepressants on popular notions of women's depressive illness
Prozac on the Couch
Understanding Psychotropic Medications as Literary Symbols
Fifty years ago, the humanities were considered vital to the profession of psychiatry. Academic journals regularly published articles about literature, art, and cinema. Psychiatrists analyzed works of fiction in presentations at professional meetings as a matter of course. And most important, residents learned about the art of the case study by reading works by Robert Lowell, James Joyce, and other writers
Dying of Whiteness
Structural competency
This paper describes a shift in medical education away from pedagogic approaches to stigma and inequalities that emphasize cross-cultural understandings of individual patients, toward attention to forces that influence health outcomes at levels above individual interactions. It reviews existing structural approaches to stigma and health inequalities developed outside of medicine, and proposes changes to U.S. medical education that will infuse cli…
Using a structural competency framework to teach structural racism in pre-health education
The inclusion of structural competency training in pre-health undergraduate programs may offer significant benefits to future healthcare professionals. This paper presents the results of a comparative study of an interdisciplinary pre-health curriculum based in structural competency with a traditional premedical curriculum. The authors describe the interdisciplinary pre-health curriculum, titled Medicine, Health, and Society (MHS) at Vanderbilt U…
Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms
Four assumptions frequently arise in the aftermath of mass shootings in the United States: (1) that mental illness causes gun violence, (2) that psychiatric diagnosis can predict gun crime, (3) that shootings represent the deranged acts of mentally ill loners, and (4) that gun control “won’t prevent” another Newtown (Connecticut school mass shooting). Each of these statements is certainly true in particular instances. Yet, as we show, notions of …
Assessing the impact of SSRI antidepressants on popular notions of women's depressive illness
Structural Competency
Structural Competency Jonathan M. Metzl (bio) Priscilla Wald's erudite retelling of the Henrietta Lacks story locates individual-level decisions about bodies and cells in the shifting terrain of politics, political economies, and notions of selfhood. Wald takes us on a sweeping tour of philosophical and economic challenges to the idea of "the human" that emerged nodally and communally in the post–World War II period to address the central tension…
Mother's Little Helper’
This paper examines the discourse surrounding the release in 1955 of Miltown, America's first psychotropic wonder drug. According to many histories of psychiatry, Miltown heralded the arrival of a new paradigm in treating psychiatric patients – as a drug that operated on a neurochemical level, it was argued to replace a psychoanalytic approach with its focus on the mother‐child relation. Between 1955 and 1960, articles about pharmaceutical miracl…
Prozac and the Pharmacokinetics of Narrative Form
Toward a moral reckoning on structural racism
The racial reckoning of 2020 involved the largest social movement protest in U.S. history, but support for the Black Lives Matter movement declined shortly after. To advance a moral reckoning on structural racism that dismantles racialized structures and redresses racial inequities, we call on scholar activists within the field of community psychology to realign their own practices by (a) examining structural factors; (b) encouraging structural t…
Structural competency and the future of firearm research
In this critical literature review we develop a five-part agenda for pandemic-era research into mass shootings and multiple-victim homicides that promotes understanding the psychologies of individual shooters within larger structures and systems. We show how the momentous events set in motion by the COVID-19 virus, and the structural drivers of inequity and racism that its spread exposed, challenge mental health research on gun trauma to better a…
Racializing Covid-19
To what extent have social media discussions of health racialized during the COVID-19 pandemic? How has the spread of racialized social media health content influenced attitudes about race and COVID-19? To answer these questions, we collected data on public US Facebook posts from 2019–2020 related to health and health care (n ≃ 9,659,000) and document a rise in race-related and racist language in online discussions directly-related to health duri…
We grew up in the church
Repeal the Dickey Amendment to Address Polarization Surrounding Firearms in the United States
An editorial is presented which addresses the author's views about the potential repeal of America's Dickey Amendment from 1996 in order to facilitate epidemiological research on firearm injuries and deaths in the U.S. Mistrust and political polarization are examined, along with public health research, America's gun policies, and the concept of guns as symbols of White authority in the U.S. American gun ownership and the prevention of school shoo…
Prozac and the Pharmacokinetics of Narrative Form
Prozac on the Couch
Understanding Psychotropic Medications as Literary Symbols
Fifty years ago, the humanities were considered vital to the profession of psychiatry. Academic journals regularly published articles about literature, art, and cinema. Psychiatrists analyzed works of fiction in presentations at professional meetings as a matter of course. And most important, residents learned about the art of the case study by reading works by Robert Lowell, James Joyce, and other writers
Selling Sanity Through Gender
Mother's Little Helper’
This paper examines the discourse surrounding the release in 1955 of Miltown, America's first psychotropic wonder drug. According to many histories of psychiatry, Miltown heralded the arrival of a new paradigm in treating psychiatric patients – as a drug that operated on a neurochemical level, it was argued to replace a psychoanalytic approach with its focus on the mother‐child relation. Between 1955 and 1960, articles about pharmaceutical miracl…
Cultural Sutures
Editors' Preface
Editors' Preface:Difference and Identity in Medicine Jonathan M. Metzl (bio) and Suzanne Poirier (bio) Calls from within the field of medicine have asked nurses, doctors, and other health-care workers to become more aware of matters of difference. "[B]ias in health care must be corrected not by medical ombudsmen, or by legislation . . . but by a focus on the individual—individual patients and individual doctors," Abraham Verghese writes in the ar…
Assessing the impact of SSRI antidepressants on popular notions of women's depressive illness
Difference and Identity
Great Moments
This essay sheds light on present-day pharmaceutical advertisements by looking back to an important early chapter in pharmaceutical company–sponsored promotion: the Great Moments in Medicine and Great Moments in Pharmacy series of commercial paintings produced by Parke, Davis and Company between 1948 and 1964. Beginning in the early 1950s, Parke-Davis delivered reproductions of the Great Moments series to physicians and pharmacies throughout the …
Taking Pleasure in Drugs
Book Review| June 01 2011 Taking Pleasure in Drugs Pleasure Consuming Medicine: The Queer Politics of DrugsRace, Kane Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. xvii +257 pp. Jonathan M. Metzl Jonathan M. Metzl Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2011) 17 (2-3): 435–437. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-1163623 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jonathan M. M…
Mainstream Anxieties about Race in Antipsychotic Drug Ads
Marketing research consistently shows that pharmaceutical advertisements entice patients to ask for particular medications and physicians to prescribe them [1]. How do these advertisements work? Supporters of pharmaceutical advertisements argue that the ads provide patients and doctors with important information about new medications in ways that help both parties make informed treatment decisions [2]. Critics meanwhile contend that pharmaceutica…
Structural Competency
Structural Competency Jonathan M. Metzl (bio) Priscilla Wald's erudite retelling of the Henrietta Lacks story locates individual-level decisions about bodies and cells in the shifting terrain of politics, political economies, and notions of selfhood. Wald takes us on a sweeping tour of philosophical and economic challenges to the idea of "the human" that emerged nodally and communally in the post–World War II period to address the central tension…
Structural Competency Meets Structural Racism
Physicians in the United States have long been trained to assess race and ethnicity in the context of clinical interactions.Medical students learn to identify how their patients' "demographic and cultural factors" influence their health behaviors [1].Interns and residents receive "cultural competency" training to help them communicate with persons of differing "ethnic" backgrounds [2].And clinicians are taught to observe the races of their patien…
Structural competency
This paper describes a shift in medical education away from pedagogic approaches to stigma and inequalities that emphasize cross-cultural understandings of individual patients, toward attention to forces that influence health outcomes at levels above individual interactions. It reviews existing structural approaches to stigma and health inequalities developed outside of medicine, and proposes changes to U.S. medical education that will infuse cli…
The Interdependence of African American Men's Definitions of Manhood and Health
In this article, we explore themes that cut across how 24- to 77-year-old African American men define manhood and health. Utilizing a thematic approach, we analyzed data from 9 focus groups (N = 73). We found that manhood and health were relational constructs that are interrelated in men's minds and experiences. Manhood and health were defined by the characteristics men embody, the behaviors men engage in, and the goals and values men had to posi…
Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms
Four assumptions frequently arise in the aftermath of mass shootings in the United States: (1) that mental illness causes gun violence, (2) that psychiatric diagnosis can predict gun crime, (3) that shootings represent the deranged acts of mentally ill loners, and (4) that gun control “won’t prevent” another Newtown (Connecticut school mass shooting). Each of these statements is certainly true in particular instances. Yet, as we show, notions of …
Metzl Responds
Metzl Responds Affiliation Jonathan Metzl MD, PhDJonathan Metzl is the 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 at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN.CopyRightCorrespondence should be sent to Jonathan M. Metzl, Director, Vanderbilt Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, 2301 Vanderbilt Place, Nashville, TN 372…
Developing and Evaluating an Innovative Structural Competency Curriculum for Pre-Health Students
The inclusion of structural competency training in pre-health undergraduate programs may offer significant benefits to future healthcare professionals. This paper presents the results of a comparative study of an interdisciplinary pre-health curriculum based in structural competency with a traditional premedical curriculum. The authors describe a new evaluation tool, the Structural Foundations of Health Survey © (2016), developed to evaluate stru…
Repeal the Dickey Amendment to Address Polarization Surrounding Firearms in the United States
An editorial is presented which addresses the author's views about the potential repeal of America's Dickey Amendment from 1996 in order to facilitate epidemiological research on firearm injuries and deaths in the U.S. Mistrust and political polarization are examined, along with public health research, America's gun policies, and the concept of guns as symbols of White authority in the U.S. American gun ownership and the prevention of school shoo…
Using a structural competency framework to teach structural racism in pre-health education
The inclusion of structural competency training in pre-health undergraduate programs may offer significant benefits to future healthcare professionals. This paper presents the results of a comparative study of an interdisciplinary pre-health curriculum based in structural competency with a traditional premedical curriculum. The authors describe the interdisciplinary pre-health curriculum, titled Medicine, Health, and Society (MHS) at Vanderbilt U…
Structural competency and the future of firearm research
In this critical literature review we develop a five-part agenda for pandemic-era research into mass shootings and multiple-victim homicides that promotes understanding the psychologies of individual shooters within larger structures and systems. We show how the momentous events set in motion by the COVID-19 virus, and the structural drivers of inequity and racism that its spread exposed, challenge mental health research on gun trauma to better a…
Rural and nonrural racial variation in mentally unhealthy days
Rural-nonrural health disparities are well documented, yet researchers rarely consider how mental health is experienced across racial groups in rural areas. Black Americans frequently demonstrate better mental health than White Americans, which is puzzling, given their exposure to interpersonal and structural racism and discrimination. To determine if this paradoxical mental health patterning occurs within the context of rurality, we used zero-in…
Toward a moral reckoning on structural racism
The racial reckoning of 2020 involved the largest social movement protest in U.S. history, but support for the Black Lives Matter movement declined shortly after. To advance a moral reckoning on structural racism that dismantles racialized structures and redresses racial inequities, we call on scholar activists within the field of community psychology to realign their own practices by (a) examining structural factors; (b) encouraging structural t…
The Protest Psychosis & the Future of Equity & Diversity Efforts in American Psychiatry
This essay chronicles the history of medical associations between schizophrenia and Blackness that emerged during the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s, when American psychiatrists overdiagnosed schizophrenia in Black men in ways that undermined brain science of the era. I provide data to show how racially disparate diagnostic outcomes resulted not solely from the attitudes or biases of clinicians, but from a series of larger political an…
Medicine (20 works) · Psychology (20 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Political science (16 works) · Law (11 works) · Psychiatry (9 works) · Art (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · Social Psychology (8 works) · Gender Studies (7 works)