5 ideas
In a 1968 Archives of General Psychiatry article, Walter Bromberg and Franck Simon described a 'protest psychosis' among Black men. They cast political anger and Black Power sympathies as schizophrenic symptoms: hostility, delusions of persecution, and rejection of white authority. The label converted political resistance into individual pathology, so the grievance became the symptom rather than the thing to be addressed.
Ionia State Hospital's records show that in the 1920s–50s schizophrenia was mostly diagnosed in white, often female or middle-class patients described as withdrawn, harmless, or 'feminine.' By the late 1960s its schizophrenic population had become disproportionately Black men, many transferred from Detroit courts and prisons. The same diagnostic label thus came to hold a different demographic and different assumptions about danger.
Read a diagnostic category as a record of what a society fears at a given moment, not as a stable description of a disease. When the cultural meaning of an illness changes, notice who is being newly diagnosed and what behavior is being medicalized. The shift often tracks political conflict more closely than any advance in biology.
Many of Ionia's clinicians were well-meaning, yet their diagnoses systematically disadvantaged Black patients. The racism lived in institutional channels: court referrals, diagnostic manuals, drug advertisements, and how charts were written. Individual goodwill could not correct this, because the bias was built into the tools and pathways clinicians relied on.
Antipsychotic advertisements in psychiatric journals of the 1970s, such as those for Haldol, showed angry Black men with raised fists or African imagery as the targets of treatment. The ads sold the drugs as tools for controlling threatening, often politically charged, patients. This spread the link between Blackness, violence, and schizophrenia through clinicians' everyday reading.