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http://somatosphere.net/2014/12/psychiatry-after-ferguson.html
Yet even while there is a clear need for healing, history provides an important caveat that mental health communities would do well to keep in mind. In times of racial political crisis, mental health rubrics have in the past been used to locate social “pathologies” in the minds of oppressed persons, while bolstering the very power structures that their protests fight against.
Consider the psychiatric response to the protests during the civil rights era of the 1960s and 1970s. A number of psychiatrists aligned with calls for racial justice and equality, decried the lack of “racial integration,” and critiqued how “white norms” produced psychological oppression. And the profession itselfbegan its first slow steps toward training and hiring more black psychiatrists and psychologists.
During the same era, however, under the guise of “treating” mental anguish in African American populations, a number of high-profile research articles in psychiatric journals blatantly defined civil rights participation as a form of mental illness—or worse, depicted racial protest as a form of psychosis that produced anxiety…in whites.
The best known practitioners of this approach were psychiatrists Walter Bromberg and Frank Simon, who, in the aftermath protests in Detroit, Newark, and Los Angeles, wrote articles in the Archives of General Psychiatrythat detailed how black anger was fuelled by a “protest psychosis”—a condition in which the rhetoric of the Black Power movement drove “Negro men” to forms of insanity (“…the stress of asserting civil rights in the United States these past ten years and the corresponding nationalistic fervor of Afro-American nations during the same time period has stimulated specific reactive psychoses in American Negroes”) marked by anger, hostility, and acts that Bromberg and Simon shockingly called “racial antagonism of the Negroes to the Caucasian group.”
another quotation
These and other nascent interventions suggest the possibility of a new politics of mental health, and medicine more broadly, in the aftermath of Ferguson. In this new reality, psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers continue to empathically treat psychological distress. But they also recognize ways that the very health systems of which they are a part can contribute to disparity and inequality.
Psychiatry propping up the status quo isn't a new idea but an interesting article from Proff Metzl imo.
Yet even while there is a clear need for healing, history provides an important caveat that mental health communities would do well to keep in mind. In times of racial political crisis, mental health rubrics have in the past been used to locate social “pathologies” in the minds of oppressed persons, while bolstering the very power structures that their protests fight against.
Consider the psychiatric response to the protests during the civil rights era of the 1960s and 1970s. A number of psychiatrists aligned with calls for racial justice and equality, decried the lack of “racial integration,” and critiqued how “white norms” produced psychological oppression. And the profession itselfbegan its first slow steps toward training and hiring more black psychiatrists and psychologists.
During the same era, however, under the guise of “treating” mental anguish in African American populations, a number of high-profile research articles in psychiatric journals blatantly defined civil rights participation as a form of mental illness—or worse, depicted racial protest as a form of psychosis that produced anxiety…in whites.
The best known practitioners of this approach were psychiatrists Walter Bromberg and Frank Simon, who, in the aftermath protests in Detroit, Newark, and Los Angeles, wrote articles in the Archives of General Psychiatrythat detailed how black anger was fuelled by a “protest psychosis”—a condition in which the rhetoric of the Black Power movement drove “Negro men” to forms of insanity (“…the stress of asserting civil rights in the United States these past ten years and the corresponding nationalistic fervor of Afro-American nations during the same time period has stimulated specific reactive psychoses in American Negroes”) marked by anger, hostility, and acts that Bromberg and Simon shockingly called “racial antagonism of the Negroes to the Caucasian group.”
another quotation
These and other nascent interventions suggest the possibility of a new politics of mental health, and medicine more broadly, in the aftermath of Ferguson. In this new reality, psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers continue to empathically treat psychological distress. But they also recognize ways that the very health systems of which they are a part can contribute to disparity and inequality.
Psychiatry propping up the status quo isn't a new idea but an interesting article from Proff Metzl imo.
