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African-American men are diagnosed with schizophrenia at rates four to five time more than other groups. Schizophrenia is a biologically based disease, with no genetic links to ethnicity or gender. Are black men inherently crazy?

From the 1920s to the 1950s, schizophrenia was considered a fairly harmless disease that primarily affected whites. The illness was associated with "emotional disharmony" and the suggested treatment for those affected was that they be nurtured, not feared.

But in the 1960s and 1970s, advertisements for new schizophrenia drugs appeared featuring scary-looking black men under the tagline, "Assaultive and belligerent?" Apparently, "cooperation" could be achieved with doses of an antipsychotic drug, Haldol.

Schizophrenia became a black disease. And black men, labeled paranoid, hostile and violent, literally became the poster children.

Jonathan M. Metzl, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan, decided to trace the troubled history of schizophrenia. By gaining access to archives of Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, a mental asylum located in Michigan that was open between 1885 and 1975, Metzl began unraveling the tangled roots of schizophrenia and race. He compiled findings in the new book The Protest Psychosis (Beacon Press, 2009). Part reportage, part analysis, part theory, Metzl challenges readers to peel back the layered complexities of race and medicine.

Read the entire piece.

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