In the 1960s, schizophrenia went from being a popular mental health disorder among white women to being disproportionately diagnosed among Black men. The switch? A deliberate effort to "Blacken" the illness.
By 2000, Black Americans were three to five times as likely as whites to be diagnosed with schizophrenia, arguably one of the most stigmatized mental illnesses. During the 1960s, when Black folks were fighting for civil rights, racist psychiatrists came up with the term “protest psychosis.”
Black men who were described as hostile, aggressive, and delusionally anti-white were diagnosed with protest psychosis or schizophrenia. What was actually happening was that these men were listening to militant leaders like Malcolm X, who inspired them to resist the anti-Blackness pervading their daily life. They prescribed psychiatric treatment to Black men who dared to disrupt the social order of white America.
It wasn't the first time white doctors invented illnesses, leveraging their medical authority to break Black political power. In 1851, physician Samuel A. Cartwright came up with a malady called drapetomania, which made enslaved people want to flee captivity. His prescribed cure: "beating the devil out of them."
The pathologization of Black suffering isn't new. White supremacy culture creates the distress and then blames and medicates without identifying or treating the structural anti-Blackness embedded into our society. We must continue to advocate for ourselves, enter the mental health field, and create our own safe spaces. Healing ourselves is a task we can't trust a white system to do.