teenytinychild:

“In clinical psychiatric settings, black women are diagnosed very differently from white counterparts who present with the same symptoms. For instance, black women have considerably higher rates of anxiety disorders than white women. Blacks are diagnosed with higher lifetime rates of simple phobia, social phobia, and agoraphobia. Therapists tend to view African American women as anxious or phobic while perceiving white women who describe similar emotions and behaviors as sad and depressed. Black women are more likely to be described by therapists as hostile and paranoid, and diagnosis for black women is inclined to be more severe than for white women. In these diagnostic differences we see the operation of the social construction of black womanhood that disallows sadness. Therapists are less likely to perceive a black woman as sad; instead, they see her as angry or anxious.”

— Melissa Harris-Perry Sister Citizen; Shame, Stereotypes and Black Women in America 

To anyone who reblogged this post, I recommend Metzl’s book ‘The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease’. Never underestimate the power of psychiatry as a tool for social control, particularly over women and POC:

“I found dramatic racial and gender shifts in persons diagnosed with schizophrenia at Ionia [state psychiatric hospital in Michigan] during the 1960s—so much so that schizophrenia’s racial and gendered transformation became the central narrative of my book. This shift became apparent very early in my research. Before the 60s, Ionia doctors viewed schizophrenia as an illness that afflicted nonviolent, white, petty criminals, including the hospital’s considerable population of women from rural Michigan. Charts emphasized the negative impact of “schizophrenogenic styles” on these women’s abilities to perform their duties as mothers and wives.

To say the least, these patients were not seen as threatening. This patient wasn’t able to take care of her family as she should, read one chart; another, This patient is not well adjusted and can’t do her housework; and another, She got confused and talked too loudly and embarrassed her husband.

By the mid- to late-1960s, however, schizophrenia was a diagnosis disproportionately applied to the hospital’s growing population of African American men from urban Detroit. Perhaps the most shocking evidence I uncovered was that hospital charts “diagnosed” these men in part because of their symptoms, but also because of their connections to the civil rights movement. Many of the men were sent to Ionia after convictions for crimes that ranged from armed robbery to participation in civil-rights protests, to property destruction during periods of civil unrest, such as the Detroit riots of 1968. Charts stressed how hallucinations and delusions rendered these men as threats not only to other patients, but also to clinicians, ward attendants, and to society itself. You’d see comments like Paranoid against his doctors and the police. Or, Would be a danger to society were he not in an institution.”

(Source: brashblacknonbeliever)

Notes

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