Metzl found that clinicians started to depict Black mental patients as threatening and uncontrollable, while white patients with the same illness were described sympathetically as “withdrawn,” nonviolent, and compliant. Suddenly, the rates of schizophrenia among Black men skyrocketed, and the entire image of the disease changed. The title of Metzl’s book came from a 1968 piece in Archives of General Psychiatry, in which two psychiatrists redefined schizophrenia as “a protest psychosis” that involved Black patients who had become hostile, aggressive, and developed “delusional anti-whiteness”
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