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The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease
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About The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became A
Product 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. This book was published with two different covers. Customers will be shipped the book with one of the two covers. Review “A terrific new book . . . exceptional and unexpected.” —Melissa Harris-Lacewell, The Nation blog “A fascinating, penetrating book by one of medicine’s most exceptional young scholars.” —Delese Wear , JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association “A stunning and disturbing book . . . [A] compelling cultural history that exposes postwar psychiatry’s racist character and its enduring legacy.”—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original “Part reportage, part analysis, part theory . . . Metzl challenges readers to peel back the layered complexities of race and medicine.”—Felicia Pride , The Root “[Metzl] make[s] a powerful case for the way schizophrenia was transformed into a racialized disease.”—Christopher Lane , Psychology Today “Metzl addresses a long-standing diagnostic tension in psychiatry with insight, clarity, and informative historical detail.” —Health Affairs About the Author Jonathan M. Metzl is associate professor of psychiatry and women’s studies and director of the Culture, Health, and Medicine Program at the University of Michigan. A 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, Metzl has written extensively for medical, psychiatry, and popular publications. His books include Prozac on the Couch and Difference and Identity in Medicine. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1: Homicidal Cecil Peterson had no history with the police. Even on the day the white stranger insulted his mother, Peterson simply wanted to eat lunch. He sat in his usual seat at the counter of the diner on Woodward Street and ordered his usual BLT and coffee. Somehow he caught the stranger’s eye in the squinted way that begets immediate conflict between men. The stranger glared. Peterson was not one to walk away from confrontation, but he knew the implications of glaring back. One should not glare back at a white man. So he looked down. But the two men crossed paths again after Peterson paid his tab and walked outside. And then came the remark. And then came the fight. Two white Detroit police officers happened to be passing by the diner that September day in 1966. They ran to the altercation and tried to separate the combatants. At that point, according to their formal report, Peterson turned on the officers and struck them “without provocation.” According to the report, Peterson knocked one officer down and “kicked him in the side.” A second police team arrived and assisted in apprehending the “agitated” Mr. Peterson. Medics took the first officers on the scene to the Wayne County Hospital emergency room. The ER physician’s report noted that both officers had “bruises,” though neither required treatment. The white stranger was not charged. Peterson was twenty-nine, African American, and an unmarried father of four who worked the line at Cadillac Motor Company. He had not p
