The Protest Psychosis & the Future of Equity & Diversity Efforts in American Psychiatry

Abstract

Abstract This essay chronicles the history of medical associations between schizophrenia and Blackness that emerged during the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s, when American psychiatrists overdiagnosed schizophrenia in Black men in ways that undermined brain science of the era. I provide data to show how racially disparate diagnostic outcomes resulted not solely from the attitudes or biases of clinicians, but from a series of larger political and social determinants, most notably changing frameworks surrounding mental illness and political protest. I conclude by highlighting how training clinicians to examine their own cultural biases also needs to include training in how structures and institutions produce symptoms and diseases, and how we can only build better structures to support health if we can individually and then communally imagine them.