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A review by eudaemonics
The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease by Jonathan M. Metzl
challenging
dark
informative
slow-paced
4.5
Metzl paints a graphic and saddening picture of the history of schizophrenia as a disease and the way the "look" of schizophrenia has evolved specifically in the United States of America.
Psychiatry has been dominated by specifically white and white male voices, and I think a shift towards intersectionality and cross-cultural understanding has only begun recently. Metzl marries his backgrounds in sociology and psychology to shed light on the way psychiatric diagnoses are not static categories, but things that are informed by their time periods and dominant cultural attitudes and will grow and change to reflect those things. Diagnoses are born from the intermingling of these factors and while psychiatry is not always a tool for social control, in the context of schizophrenia it is still used to wrongfully incarcerate black men at a disproportionate rate and feed the American prison industrial complex -- which is in itself just slavery with a new coat of paint on it.
This book does nothing to provide answers to the problem it sheds light on, but I don't think that is the intent in the first place. It does provide us with the tools, language, and context to speak out against the stigma of schizophrenia in the modern USA.
Psychiatry has been dominated by specifically white and white male voices, and I think a shift towards intersectionality and cross-cultural understanding has only begun recently. Metzl marries his backgrounds in sociology and psychology to shed light on the way psychiatric diagnoses are not static categories, but things that are informed by their time periods and dominant cultural attitudes and will grow and change to reflect those things. Diagnoses are born from the intermingling of these factors and while psychiatry is not always a tool for social control, in the context of schizophrenia it is still used to wrongfully incarcerate black men at a disproportionate rate and feed the American prison industrial complex -- which is in itself just slavery with a new coat of paint on it.
This book does nothing to provide answers to the problem it sheds light on, but I don't think that is the intent in the first place. It does provide us with the tools, language, and context to speak out against the stigma of schizophrenia in the modern USA.