On February 7, the WMU Ethics Center Book Club had its first of two meetings to discuss The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease by Jonathan M. Metzl, which is a study on the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ionia, Michigan.
Dr. Michael Redinger gave a brief history of the Kalamazoo Psychiatric Hospital before diving into discussion surrounding the main topic of the book: that there has been a shift in the diagnosis of schizophrenia as well as the patient population that is diagnosed with it. Whereas the diagnosis was most common for white women pre-1950, it became a more common diagnosis for Black men after 1950.
This led to discussion about the fact that schizophrenia is a construct that has changed, and that diagnoses are socially influenced or conditioned, particularly in relation to race and ethnicity. Even if one is taught to be objective with their diagnoses, being objective still means objectifying to a certain extent in order to describe behavior, meaning that some degree of subjectivity and bias still exists. Discussion participants agreed that context, including cultural context, is important to understanding a patient’s standard behavior in order to assess what might be outside those parameters and therefore considered for treatment. In line with this approach is the idea that people are allowed to cope differently, and the ultimate goal of psychiatric treatment is to bring people to an optimal level of health. The group was also given the reminder that mental illness does not change a person’s worth, and that there is still a need to destigmatize mental health issues.
The second part of the discussion will occur on February 21, and will concentrate more on the connection between race and schizophrenia and what we can do to mitigate racial bias in fields like psychiatry.
Book Summary:
“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. 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 protesters at Ionia—for political reasons as well as clinical ones. Expertly sifting through a vast array of cultural documents, Metzl shows how associations between schizophrenia and blackness emerged during the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s—and he provides a cautionary tale of how anxieties about race continue to impact doctor-patient interactions in our seemingly postracial America.”
WMU English ABAR Group 