Book 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.…
Why read it?
1 author picked The Protest Psychosis as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
The abuse of power is a running theme in the history of psychiatry. Psychiatry has often been wielded to control those who challenge the status quo. This book neatly and creatively unearths one such attempt to stifle dissent by labeling it mad.
Focusing on a mental hospital in Michigan, Jonathan Metzl shows how schizophrenia was harnessed to pathologize Black Civil Rights activism in the 1960s. In the process, schizophrenia was transformed from a condition mainly diagnosed in whites to one that stressed violence and aggression and was mainly diagnosed in black males. I especially love how Metzl punctuates his historical…
From Owen's list on The best books on psychiatry’s troubled past.
If you love The Protest Psychosis...
December on 5C4
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
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