In The Protest Psychosis, Jonathan Metzl, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan, traces how schizophrenia became a black disease in the 1960s in much the same way that drapetomania became a black disease in the 1860s. Like Dr. Cartwright’s use of mental illness to explain black resistance to enslavement, psychiatrists in the civil rights era began to explain black urban unrest as a symptom of mental instability.
