Jonathan Metzl Book order

An urgent wake-up call about the future of gun safety reform in America

The mortal consequences of right-wing backlash politics for the white voters they promise to help

A powerful account of how cultural anxieties about race shaped American notions of mental illness The civil rights era is largely remembered as a time of sit-ins, boycotts, and riots. But a very different civil rights history evolved at the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ionia, Michigan. In The Protest Psychosis, psychiatrist and cultural critic Jonathan Metzl tells the shocking story of how schizophrenia became the diagnostic term overwhelmingly applied to African American protesters at Ionia—for political reasons as well as clinical ones. Expertly sifting through a vast array of cultural documents, Metzl shows how associations between schizophrenia and blackness emerged during the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s—and he provides a cautionary tale of how anxieties about race continue to impact doctor-patient interactions in our seemingly postracial America. This book was published with two different covers. Customers will be shipped the book with one of the two covers.

Argues that the rise in psychiatric drug treatments was not a radical turn away from psychoanalysis, but instead carries on Freudian assumptions, especially in relation to gender.