13 times psychiatry and psychology oppressed Black men and women

Why is the racist history of psychiatry and psychology so often ignored?

It’s Black History Month, and as someone who fights oppression and pathologisation in psychiatry, psychology and mental health - teaching about the embedded racism in our disciplines is central to everything I do.

Here are just 13 examples of the way psychiatry and psychology has oppressed and abused Black adults and children in the last 150 years:

- Psychiatrists made up ‘drapetomania’ in 1890 - a mental disorder which supposedly caused Black enslaved people to try to run away from White slave owners and plantations. Top psychiatrists claimed that it was a mental illness for Black people to attempt to escape, because their ‘natural state is slavery’. The ’treatment’ for drapetomania was 100 lashes.

- Psychiatrists invented ‘dysaethesia aethiopia’, a mental illness described as a depressed, lethargic, dullness of enslaved Black people.

- Psychiatrists argued that Black people suffered from an innate mental illness which caused ‘an irrational hatred of white people, a delusional anti-whiteness’. For this reason, psychiatrists opposed interracial relationships. They taught people (and governments) that Black people were innately mentally ill, and if they were allowed to have children with White people, they would spread mental illness into the White population.

- Around and following emancipation, psychiatrists and the US government argued that freeing enslaved Black people would actually harm their mental health, and cause them to become ‘even more insane’ because they needed hard labour working outside in order to keep them controlled.

- Black people were described and treated as ‘savages’, ‘primitive’, ‘undeveloped’, ‘uncivilised’ and in need of control by white psychiatrists and psychologists. They were segregated in mental health facilities, and kept outside or in separate workhouses and farming blocks – away from the white patients. It was believed that the presence of Black people would harm the ‘healing’ of white people in the asylums.

- Psychiatrists and psychologists argued that Black people had smaller, less sophisticated brains than White people

- Psychiatrists supported eugenics, and argued that Black women should be sterilised and stopped from having further children. The legal sterilisation of Black women surged between the 1920s and 1970s, with some countries and US states seeking to sterilise as many Black women as possible, usually by diagnosing them with psychosis first. By the 1970s in North Carolina for example, 85 per cent of all legally sterilised people were Black women who had been declared ‘mentally defective’ in order to stop them from having their own children.

- Between 1930 and 1970, Black men and women were also the primary victims of frontal lobotomy experiments and surgeries which caused incisions or removals of parts of the frontal lobes of the brain to ‘treat’ psychiatric disorders. Records show that this surgery was also carried out on Black children as young as five years old - to stop Black children from growing into ‘criminals’.

- Schizophrenia (borne out of drapetomania) became well known as the ‘Black man’s disorder’ by the 1970s, as only Black men could be diagnosed with it. It was also known as ‘Black Disorder’. The term ‘aggressive’ was added to the diagnostic criteria of schizophrenia and antipsychotics were directly marketed to Black people who were felt to be ‘out of control’ by US government who were blaming them for rising crime and drug use.

- Psychiatrists created ‘protest psychosis’ for any Black men and women who took part in political protests - they therefore added this to the criteria for Schizophrenia so protestors could be arrested and institutionalised as insane

- Black people who protested in civil rights movements and anti-racism demonstrations were often diagnosed with ‘protest psychosis’ – especially when they were linked to, or in support of, Black Power, Black Panther move- ments and Nation of Islam between 1960 and 1990. ‘Black schizophrenia’ was named as the cause of ‘urban violence’ by the US governments

- In 1960s & 1970s, the white mainstream media developed powerful stereotypes of crazed Black schizophrenic murderers who were on the loose, searching for white victims to kill because of their ‘delusional anti- whiteness’ - this stereotype continues today

- Today, 90% of all psychiatric care beds in the USA are in prisons, which are disproportionately populated by Black men with diagnoses of Schizophrenia

Psychiatry and psychology (and the mental health, and pharma industry) have been central in encouraging and proliferating racism for over a century. If you work or study in this sector, you have a responsibility to know your history. Know what our industry has done, and continue to do.

Do not look away.

Do not answer this post with ‘well, things are better now’. They are not.

Black people are still much more likely to be diagnosed as mentally ill. The NHS still reports that Black men are much more likely to be diagnosed with psychosis and schizophrenia (hmmm, where have we heard that before?)

Interestingly, and as if they have zero knowledge of history, the NHS also reports that African and Caribbean boys and men are more likely to ‘have schizophrenia’ than any other ethnic group.

In 2016 and 2017, NHS reports that Black people in the UK have ‘higher prevalence of mental illnesses’.

According to NHS digital in 2021, a disproportionate number of people from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic communities are detained under the Mental Health Act. Rates of detention for Black or Black British groups are over 4 times those of White people. Community Treatment Orders for Black or Black British groups are over 10 times those of White groups.

Black women are still more likely to be sectioned and diagnosed with personality disorders, bipolar and psychoses. Further, they are still frequently positioned as aggressive and violent when they attempt to assert themselves or protect themselves.

Psychiatry clearly continues as a form of oppression and control, and it disproportionately targets Black communities - as it always has done.

We have never actually had an inquiry, or an investigation into how much of our ‘knowledge’ and ‘research’ is based on racism and colonialism. No one has ever retracted anything. There have been no reparations.

How much would even be left, if we stripped away these racist lies?

Very little, I expect.