Black "Schizophrenics" Matter

We can’t have a complete discussion about race in America without addressing the disproportionate diagnosis of “schizophrenia” among black people.

This might sound impossible, but I ask you to check your politics at the door for this one. Can you do that? Yes, I’m paying some homage to Black Lives Matter, and yes, the movement has flaws, just as every movement has flaws. But setting aside your political leanings, can you acknowledge it has reinitiated an important conversation in this country?

This post is not intended to further polarize anyone or to “signal virtue.” It’s intended to educate people regarding the long and dark history of mental illness diagnosis in black Americans. As a white man, as a self-proclaimed former “schizophrenic,” as a concerned citizen of a country that appears to be tearing itself apart by the day, I feel a duty to wade into the current culture wars holding a sign that reads….

“DO MORE SHADOW WORK.”

I don’t care which side of the political aisle you’re on. We all need to do more shadow work.

What do I mean by this? Our planet is crying out for genuine psychological healing, which can only be accomplished if we are each willing to dive into the darkest aspects of ourselves and integrate the “split-off” parts we’ve disowned. This is one reason I consider “schizophrenics” so fortunate: their shadows come alive in a way that potentially allows them to do deeper psychological work on themselves than is immediately available for the average person.

But let us not forget that in addition to individual shadow work, there is also a great deal of collective shadow work for us to do. Right now, as the culture wars reach a boiling point, I believe we are being afforded a precious opportunity to do some deep collective shadow work regarding the racial divides in this country, no doubt some of our largest collective shadows.

As part of that work, it’s time for us to reckon with the fact that black Americans are three to four times more likely to receive the “schizophrenia” diagnosis than white Americans. The rate of diagnosis among black Americans is so high that some researchers have been inclined to call it a “black disease.”

If you follow me, you know I don’t subscribe to the mainstream medical model regarding “schizophrenia” and therefore don’t agree that it’s a disease. If we lived in a more enlightened society, it would not be a devastating event to receive such a diagnosis (truth be told, the diagnosis probably wouldn’t exist, but that’s a discussion for another day). When allowed to unfold in a proper manner and when tempered with the right tools, “schizophrenia” has the potential to become a profound spiritual development process, and then to resolve itself. I know this from first-hand experience.

That being said, I recognize that such lofty ideas are unlikely to mean very much for people facing real-world, oftentimes “bottom-rung” adversity and in that sense, the above statistic is revealing. Studies confirm that “schizophrenia” disproportionately affects the disadvantaged—especially those who’ve been severely traumatized during childhood, often growing up in impoverished and violent urban neighborhoods. People in the bottom quartile of the socioeconomic ladder have nearly eight times the risk of being diagnosed “schizophrenic” as people from the top quartile. Combine this with other cultural factors, such as poor access to quality mental health services in inner cities, and we seem to have discovered the primary reason black Americans experience such higher rates of “schizophrenia” than white Americans: the fact that they experience greater overall adversity.

But we’re still missing a key factor that can only be uncovered when you dig into the shameful history of mental illness diagnosis in black Americans. A good place to start is in the 19th century when, as Robert Whitaker points out in Mad in America, “the perceived mental health of African-Americans was closely tied to their legal status as free men or slaves. Those who lived in free states, or those who were slaves and publicly exhibited a desire to be free, were at particular risk of being seen as insane.”

We learn that mental illness diagnosis served the preservation of power. Just read the words of two-time vice president John Calhoun: “The African is incapable of self-care and sinks into lunacy under the burden of freedom. It is a mercy to give him the guardianship and protection from mental death.” One influential Southern doctor named Samuel Cartwright identified a type of insanity caused by slave owners being too kind “to their negroes… treating them as equals.” His suggested cure was “light beatings and hard labor,” which could turn an “arrant rascal into a good negro that can hoe or plow.”

Sadly, such sickening, politically motivated misdiagnoses of insanity did not end with slavery. They continued well after Southern black people had been emancipated from slavery and “found themselves newly at risk of being locked up in mental asylums,” as Robert Whitaker writes. “The definition of sanity in ‘negroes’ was still tied to behavior that a slave owner liked to see: a docile, hardworking laborer who paid him proper respect. ‘Negroes’ who strayed too far from that behavioral norm were candidates for being declared insane and were put away in asylums, jails, and poorhouses.”

Would you be surprised if I told you a similar story extends well into the 20th century? Fast forward a hundred years and you will find black people being funneled into the “schizophrenic” category at rates that greatly exceeded that of white people—five to seven times more often—and being committed against their will to psychiatric hospitals. As Jonathan Metzl observed in an interview with Psychology Today, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) released its second edition in 1968, right “in the midst of a political climate marked by profound protest and social unrest… Prior to the second edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, “schizophrenia” was viewed by clinicians as a generally calm disorder… That text recast the paranoid subtype of schizophrenia as a disorder of masculinized belligerence. ‘The patient’s attitude is frequently hostile and aggressive,’ DSM-II claimed, ‘and his behavior tends to be consistent with his delusions.’”

In The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease, Metzl writes about how ‘this language was used to justify schizophrenia diagnoses in black men in the 1960’s and 1970’s… mental hospitals began diagnosing African-Americans with schizophrenia because of their connection to the civil rights movement. Many blacks were sent to institutions after convictions for crimes [related] to participation in civil rights protests.”

When one investigates the true history of this so-called disease, shall we say, the “people’s history,” one cannot escape the notion that the diagnosis of “schizophrenia” is and always has been an inherently political event. As Seth Farber writes in The Spiritual Gift of Madness, “Diagnosing people as mad has more to do with social control than therapy.” There are few more effective ways to invalidate a human being and deprive them of their civil liberties. When one considers that these are often very bright souls whose spiritual bullshit detectors disallow them from adapting to a dysfunctional society and therefore a process of psychospiritual death and renewal is initiated in order to hopefully free them from such dysfunctional ways of living, one is faced with a disturbing conclusion I’ve stated in the past and will state again for those who haven’t heard it: by interrupting this process through conventional psychiatric methods, we are snuffing out our potential shamans.

This might not sound very politically correct or scientific, but I’ve spent a long time observing that many black people seem more “in touch with their souls” than people of other ethnicities. Have you ever wondered why the word “soul” was added to many of their passions such as “soul music” and “soul food?” It’s almost as though they can access the spiritual domains more easily, which would explain why entering a black church is so electrifying. Because of their spiritual openness, does it not then follow that black people may be more prone to influxes from the Spiritual Ground which can unseat the ego and occasionally cause full-blown ascents (or descents) into the spiritual realm?

This could additionally explain the higher incidence of so-called “schizophrenia” in their communities, what may amount to misdiagnosis in many cases. A study conducted in 1982 interviewed 1,023 black Americans who had been diagnosed “schizophrenic” and concluded that 64 percent didn’t exhibit the symptoms necessary for such a diagnosis.

I realize I’ve covered a lot of very sensitive ground in this post. I hope I did so with gracefulness, especially considering that I’m white. I invite you to do some self-inquiry regarding what I put forward. Did you get triggered? Where do you have unexamined shadow surrounding this topic? Where do WE have unexamined shadow surrounding this topic? Remember that shadow is both individual and collective.

Perhaps if we zoom out and examine the “cosmic cycles” underlying the chaos of 2020, we can see why the Black Lives Matter protests erupted the same year our system was exposed as the delicate house of cards it has been all along. The protests can be viewed as antibodies rushing toward an infection site. At first glance, police brutality toward black Americans may not seem directly related to COVID-19. But when we take the larger view, we see that our treatment of blacks is one of the central American stories and therefore, it cannot be extricated from the most newsworthy event of a truly epochal year.

A friend of mine, David Bronstein, reached out to me recently, wondering what the “collective liberatory implications” are of my work, and how the “structures of racism [might] be composted in order to truly embrace the gift of what is pathologized as schizophrenia.” I guess this post is an initial attempt to answer that question. Perhaps I’m out of my depth. Or perhaps it is precisely having descended into my own dark depths and returned to normal ego-functioning that qualifies me to comment on this cultural conflict as well as some of the racial underpinnings of “schizophrenia.”

May black “schizophrenics” be liberated from their suffering, but may they also glean the necessary spiritual insights that will benefit our world. And may we start listening to them.