EIHS Lecture: Inner-City Blues: African Americans, Psychiatry, and the Post-World War II "Urban Crisis"

Psychiatrists have had a long history of drawing a tight correlation between black mental illness and city life. In the late nineteenth century, the medical profession attributed rising rates of insanity among African Americans to their emancipation and migration to urban areas. In the 1960s and 1970s, the National Institute of Mental Health became preoccupied with the psychological dimensions of the “urban crisis.” This talk will explore the efforts by the NIMH, as well as grassroots activists, to address the mental health needs of inner city residents in the postwar period. In doing so, it will encourage a rethinking of the conventional wisdom about the relationship between African Americans and psychiatry.

Martin Summers is associate professor of history and African and African Disapora Studies at Boston College, where he regularly teaches courses on post-1865 US and African American history; gender and sexuality in African-American history; and medicine and public health in the African diaspora. Summers’s current research project is a social and cultural history of medicine that focuses on African-American patients at St. Elizabeths Hospital, a federal mental institution in Washington, DC. The project uses the hospital as a case study in which to explore the intersections of the historical process of racial formation, medical and cultural understandings of insanity, the exercise of institutional power, and individual and collective agency. Summers’s research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the National Humanities Center.

Free and open to the public.

This event is part of the Thursday Series of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.