The stain of racism is deep within the origins of Psychiatry and Psychology.

History lesson thread...

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Early in its lifetime, psychiatry played a central role in justifying chattel slavery. The “Father of American Psychiatry,” Benjamin Rush, stated in 1799 that Black people suffered from a disease similar to leprosy, called “Negritude.”

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He asserted that this disease could only be cured by “removing the Negro’s blackness,” as if Black people could become White through some intervention.

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Being Black was labeled a pathology, justifying the depraved institution of slavery.

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Psychiatry also helped to justify the brutality with which white people treated enslaved Africans. Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright in the mid-19th century defined two illnesses supposedly common among African slaves...

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Drapetomania, which supposedly caused slaves to run away, and Dysaesthesia Aethiopis, for which symptoms included disobeying orders and refusing to work. For both ailments, Dr. Cartwright instructed slave masters to "whip the devil out of them.”

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During this time, it was popular scientific opinion that freedom was not good for Black mental health. A number of physicians asserted that slavery actually protected Black people from the "vagaries" of freedom, like overindulgence.

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In 1969, Arthur Jensen asserted that lower IQ scores among Black as compared with White people were so large that they could not be explained simply by social deprivation, but must be genetically based. That Black people are inherently intellectually inferior to Whites.

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This is despite the fact that the most widely used IQ tests in psychological research were originally standardized in white, middle-class samples and were never intended to measure innate ability.

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Research conducted in the 1980’s revealed that Black Americans were significantly more likely than Whites to be diagnosed with psychotic disorders like schizophrenia and less likely to be diagnosed with depression.

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Subsequent research demonstrated that both clinician bias in diagnosis and cultural bias in symptom presentation contributes to patterns of misdiagnosis of depression and schizophrenia among Black people.

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Black people can show a lack of trust in doctors or White people/culture, and clinicans can label these *adaptive responses to racism* as “paranoia," leading to a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

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As you can see, there are many examples of Psychiatry and Psychology supporting and reinforcing the dehumanization of Black Americans. These fields have contributed to the notion that Black people contain an inherent pathology.

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We, as a discipline, MUST discuss and address these facts of our history and work to weed out all the ways in which our origins continue to shape how we view and treat Black people.

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