Discussing his recent book The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease
Presented by The Department of Social & Cultural Analysis at New York University
Wednesday, February 2, 2011 6:00 - 8:00 PM 20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor
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 men at the Ionia State Hospital in Ionia, Michigan in the 1960s. Events at Ionia mirrored national conversations that increasingly linked blackness, madness, and civil rights. As he demonstrates, far from resulting from the racist intentions of doctors or the symptoms of specific patients, racial schizophrenia grew from a much wider set of culture shifts that defined the thoughts, actions, and even the politics of black men as being inherently insane.
Jonathan Metzl is an 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 award recipient, his books include Prozac on the Couch and Difference and Identity in Medicine.
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