471E4--Week 10 Questions/Comments--Tuesday

On page nine there is a statistic that I found interesting. In 1965, the patient population of Ionia Hospital was 1,568 and in that statistic 1,454 were men and only 114 were women. The superintendent had an issue with overcrowding but I was curious to why there were so many men in Ionia Hospital compared to the 114 women. Were men just more prone to commit crimes or fights? Or were men more noticed because of violent behavior? I find it fascinating how we see a shift from more women in the nineteenth-century to now more men when looking at the twentieth century. - Courtney Collier

Yes, Ionia Hospital is one of the most famous mental asylums for criminals, but was it a historically African American institution? Is deinstitutionalization really what killed Ionia's popularity? ~ Emily Barry

In the section with Alice Wilson, she is interviewed by Dr. Leroy. The interview in documented on pages 21-23. Are all of the questions on page 22 necessary to judge one's intelligence? Wouldn't they seem demeaning if answered incorrectly? ~ Emily Barry

In chapter three when Alice Wilson is introduced I was a bit surprised to her description as far as where her clothing came from and that she was an embarrassment to her husband. It was also interesting to see religion in the description and still playing an important factor in mental institutions in the twentieth century. I was also wondering the same thing as Emily as to why Dr. Leroy asked her questions that were more knowledge based trivia questions instead of questions where he could find links to her emotional outbursts. I don’t see what trivia has to do with a person’s mind. From asking those questions how is he truly able to diagnose her. – Courtney Collier

I was intrigued by the metaphor of schizophrenia as a reflection of the racial divide between whites and blacks and "fissured notions of unity" (115). The constant duality that schizophrenia implies can be applied to virtually any social or political topic that requires divisions of some sort. "Civilized" blacks versus "unruly" ones, "violent" and "nonviolent" blacks...give a label to a group in order to further otherize them. --Chelsea Chin

It could be because I'm taking Gilded Age with Ferrell, but I really see a lot of similarities between how native white Americans treated foreigners and immigrants (embracing and repelling "barbarian virtues") during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and how white Americans during the 1960s and 1970s treated blacks (the duality of schizophrenia and how labels applied reflect fears of society). Blacks were seen as a threat to white power, and the label of schizophrenia subjected them. --Chelsea Chin

I don’t doubt that DSM language is a good source, but is it enough to sell the story of protest psychosis? I believe 100% in structural racism coming from a sociological background, but I don’t believe his argument to be convincing. In fact some of his similar arguments such as the doctor’s gap in expertise seem more plausible to me. –Kasey Moore

Given the fact that this was during the period when all of the dynamics and dialectic within society, as well as all of its public and civic institutions, were shifting in waves and with new waves of thought and approach who’s to say that society wasn’t schizophrenic? Perhaps people weren’t mentally deranged; perhaps people were just trying to navigate their way through and negotiate their lives to a set of circumstances that logistically didn’t make sense. Perhaps that is the real question. How do you make sense out of a series of circumstances that no longer make sense when people’s sense of the world is in a constant state of flux? ~ Alex Young

For the most part I really enjoy the way Metzl has organized his book. It is easy to read and very interesting. I like how he uses different patient cases in order to show the change in schizophrenia and then follows them up with different facts about what is happening at the time and what may have caused the changes in diagnosis. On pages 25 and 26, Metzl even warns against trying to look at how schizophrenia was diagnosed through today’s lens. We have to look at it through their perspective otherwise we will never understand what was really going on. - Morgan H.

To me, it is not all that surprising that schizophrenia has been used as a diagnosis for white middle class house wives and African American men. While many of these people may have had mental problems, it can also be used to label someone who does not fit into their mold anymore. For the housewife who no longer takes care of her family in the way that she has before, she becomes schizophrenic. For the black man who steps out of line and begins to protest against whites, he becomes schizophrenic. Both have stepped out of their stereotypical place that they are meant to be in and have challenged white male authority. - Morgan H.

Reading this made me think of how the media affects our opinion on mental healthcare today. Thinking to more current events, how does the media affect our perspective of mental care after all the shootings? – Katie Tryon

I really wanted to stop reading on page 12 when Metzl describes the end of each patient file saying, “Invariably, the last note in each stack was a death certificate from the Ionia coroner.” That phrase is just so depressing! – Katie Tryon

The second great migration would help explain racial demographics changing at the Ionia Asylum, especially the influx of poorer blacks getting caught in a racial justice system that would place them in the institution. –Scott Campbell

Proliferation of anti-psychotic medication and advertisements peddling it, along with institutions having to maintain a quota of patients to keep funding, makes it seem like a lot of the diagnoses were done for financial reasons. Particularly during the 20’s thru 50’s, when whites were targeted for schizophrenia, could it be because they had the most money to exploit? Moreover, with a profit motive, the switch to blacks in the 60’s reflected women buying new pharmaceuticals (anti-depressants) so drug companies needed to capitalize on blacks, through psychiatrists, to keep the Thorazine market going. –Scott Campbell

Americans and how it subsequently became a “black disease”. This book and argument reminded me of the conversation we had in class about Girl, Interrupted and how certain mental illnesses like borderline personality disorder could more easily be a diagnosis of a certain groups like teenage girls. I love how this Metzl makes and proves this argument. Are there any other illness that you know of that are associated with a particular group of individuals? –Jack Hylan

I was glad to see the transcripts from patient interviews. They seem to provide an interesting point of view because they provide the patient "voice" that has been lacking from so many books that we've read. -Joanna Jourdan

More than anything, this book made me confused about diagnoses. I don't quite understand how types of schizophrenia were supposed to have differed from each other and how they were distinguished. Also, people can shift from having one disease to being schizophrenic? -Joanna Jourdan

Like others, I enjoyed the transcript interviews because I thought they made the dialogue more realistic and interesting. Although, as I was reading the transcripts some of the questions or response baffled me. It seemed as the the question were structured in the most awkward way possible that patients had no real way to answer such as Alice.- Maggie Nunn

I thought the integration of media sources made the book more interesting and I trusted the source more. In previous books, there has been such a large focus on the asylum that we tend to forget about the media and social context in which everything was set. - Maggie Nunn

Currently, I'm taking American Society with Dean Rucker and we just watched a documentary about the Tuskegee syphilis experiment that focused solely on African American men. Reading about how schizophrenia was so closely associated with black males seemed similar to the association in Tuskegee. With the Tuskegee experiment, over time they realized that syphilis wasn't restricted to black males just as we know that schizophrenia isn't restricted to black males. - Maggie Nunn