Girls and Their Monsters by Audrey Clare Farley

Author:Audrey Clare Farley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2023-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

When the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., first rose to prominence following the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, David Rosenthal was one of the many white Americans to regard him skeptically. The Alabama preacher claimed nonviolent methods, but the media portrayed him as vengeful.

As the civil rights movement gained steam, many of Rosenthal’s peers began to describe activists as split between desiring peace and revenge—in a word, schizophrenic. King himself used the term to denote the pull toward good and evil, or violence and nonviolence. But for psychiatrists like Walter Bromberg and Franck Simon, the connection between Black liberation and schizophrenia was not metaphorical; the crusade for equality literally caused delusions, hallucinations, and violent projections in Black men. On the basis of such logic, the FBI diagnosed activist Malcolm X as having pre-psychotic paranoid schizophrenia. Never mind that the government was profiling and tapping his phone; his fear of the state was totally beyond the pale. His mother had also been an agitator with delusions about white people. Her name: Louise Little. After spending twenty-four years in Kalamazoo State Hospital, the object of Lansing welfare officials’ disdain was finally released in 1963. The state would later send the family a petition for reimbursement for her “care” in the amount of $13,000 (about $24,000 today).

According to psychiatrist Jonathan Metzl, pharmaceutical companies swiftly tapped into the pervasive racial anxiety, which resurfaced slavery-era notions of pathological mischief-making on the part of freedom seekers. Drug advertisements in medical journals began to portray maniacal Black men alongside promises of psychotropics’ calming effects. “Assaultive and belligerent?” asked one such ad, showing a man with clenched fist and mouth wide open. “Cooperation often begins with Haldol.” At a time when white Americans were resorting to all manner of violence to protect the racial hierarchy, Big Pharma was touting its own solution: chemical incarceration.

Rosenthal did not lend his voice to this recoding of schizophrenia as a Black disease, which would soon pollute NIMH studies and even the second edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Despite the racist caricatures coming from within his profession, and despite the considerable effort on the part of the press and the FBI to present King as a grave threat to white Americans, Rosenthal became convinced it was a sincere champion of peace whose face so often came on his television screen. Perhaps because he’d endured discrimination himself, he supported the civil rights movement, the effects of which would soon reverberate in his personal life. He further kept focused on the study of schizophrenia’s transmission through both genetics and familial environment.

Nevertheless his 1963 book on the schizophrenic quadruplets fueled a public research agenda that located pathology in the person and that posited pills, not hours of talk therapy, as the solution. Despite containing only one chapter from the perspective of a geneticist and many more from the psychologists, sociologists, and social workers who’d analyzed the family, the fate of The Genain Quadruplets was already written.

In a theoretical overview concluding the massive volume,

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