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Budapest W8: Performing Arts - How schizophrenia became a black disease

Christopher Lane, “How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease: An Interview with Jonathan Metzl,” Psychology Today, May 5, 2010

"Before the 60s, Ionia doctors viewed schizophrenia as an illness that afflicted nonviolent, white, petty criminals, including the hospital's considerable population of women from rural Michigan. Charts emphasized the negative impact of "schizophrenogenic styles" on these women's abilities to perform their duties as mothers and wives."

 "By the mid- to late-1960s, however, schizophrenia was a diagnosis disproportionately applied to the hospital's growing population of African American men from urban Detroit. Perhaps the most shocking evidence I uncovered was that hospital charts "diagnosed" these men in part because of their symptoms, but also because of their connections to the civil rights movement."

 "Before the 60s, psychiatry often posited that schizophrenia was a psychological "reaction" to a splitting of the basic functions of personality. Official descriptors emphasized the generally calm nature of such persons, in ways that encouraged associations with middle-class housewives. But the frame changed in the 60s. In 1968, in the midst of a political climate marked by profound protest and social unrest, psychiatry published the second edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. That text recast the paranoid subtype of schizophrenia as a disorder of masculinized belligerence."

 "growing numbers of research articles in professional journals used this language to cast schizophrenia as a disorder of racialized aggression." 

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