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. 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.

Jonathan M. Metzl is associate professor of psychiatry and women's studies and director of the Culture, Health, and Medicine Program at the University of Michigan. A 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, Metzl has written extensively for medical, psychiatry, and popular publications. His books include Prozac on the Couch and Difference and Identity in Medicine. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Preface The Protest Psychosis Part I Ionia 1 Homicidal 2 Ionia Part II Alice Wilson 3 She Tells Very Little about Her Behavior Yet Shows a Lot 4 Loosening Associations 5 Like a Family Part III Octavius Greene 6 The Other Direction 7 Categories 8 Octavius Greene Had No Exit Interview 9 The Persistence of Memory Part IV Caeser Williams 10 Too Close for Comfort 11 His Actions Are Determined Largely by His Emotions 12 Revisionist Mystery 13 A Racialized Disease 14 A Metaphor for Race Part V Rasheed Karim 15 Turned Loose 16 Deinstitutionalization 17 Raised in a Slum Ghetto 18 Power, Knowledge, and Diagnostic Revision 19 Return of the Repressed 20 Rashomon 21 Something Else Instead Part VI Remnants 22 Locked Away 23 Diversity 24 Inside 25 Remnants 26 Controllin' the Planet 27 Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes Index