[Don't] Call Me Crazy: 33 Voices Start the Conversation about Mental Health

by Kelly Jensen

Historically and today, “troublesome women” are often psychiatrized in ways that silence them or minimize their experiences, using the stigma surrounding mental health conditions to marginalize patients. In the pre-DSM era, a dude named Samuel A. Cartwright came up with “drapetomania” to describe a curious cluster of symptoms seen in enslaved people, who for some reason kept running away from their masters. Clearly, he concluded, they did so because they were crazy. No, seriously, go look it up, but prepare to fall into the rabbit hole of scientific racism, because this wasn’t the first or the last time that perfectly rational responses to oppression were labeled as illnesses.