The Protest Psychosis & the Future of Equity & Diversity Efforts in American Psychiatry

Bibliographic Data

ID9684633
AuthorsJonathan M Metzl (0000-0002-0037-3953, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume152
Issue4
Pages92-110
Publication date2023-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueDaedalus (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0011-5266 • E-ISSN: 1548-6192
PublisherMIT Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1162/daed_a_02033
OpenAlexW4388878796
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited11

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 and social determinants, most notably changing frameworks surrounding mental illness and political protest. I conclude by highlighting how training clinicians to examine their own cultural biases also needs to include training in how structures and institutions produce symptoms and diseases, and how we can only build better structures to support health if we can individually and then communally imagine them

Cultural diversity · Diversity (politics · Equity (law · History of psychiatry · Mental health · Mental illness · Political science · Politics · Psychiatry · Psychosis · Schizophrenia (object-oriented programming · Sociology · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · Law · Mental Health and Psychiatry · Psychology