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Jonathan Metzl    

Professor of Sociology & Psychiatry, Director of the Center for Medicine, Health & Society at Vanderbilt University

Jonathan M. Metzl MD, PhD, is the Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor of Sociology and Psychiatry, and the director of the Department of Medicine, Health, and Society, at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He received his MD from the University of Missouri, MA in humanities/poetics and psychiatric internship/residency from Stanford University, and PhD in American culture from University of Michigan.

Winner of the 2020 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Book Award, the 2020 APA Benjamin Rush Award for Scholarship, and a 2010 Guggenheim fellowship, Dr. Metzl has written extensively about the relationships between guns, mass shootings, and mental illness. His books include "The Protest Psychosis," "Prozac on the Couch," "Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality," "Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland," and "What We’ve Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms."

Speech Topics

Protest Psychosis: What the Race-Based Overdiagnosis of Schizophrenia in the 1960s Reveals About Today’s CRT Wars

Battles over the role of “race” in education and the structures that uphold racial privilege and inequity burst into the national spotlight in the 2020s. But the origins of the debate, and the politics that undergird it, track back decades, and play out in unexpected ways. In this talk, Dr. Metzl provides an analysis of how, within the sociopolitical context of the 1960s and 1970s, the intersection of race and mental health altered the way that mental illness was diagnosed, understood, and treated in the United States. Once considered a nonthreatening disease that primarily targeted white middle-class women, Metzl provides an historical exploration of how schizophrenia became associated with the perceived hostility, rebellion, mistrust, and violence of Black men during the Civil Rights movement. Part historical case study and part social commentary, Dr. Metzl utilizes the complex history of the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ionia, Michigan to showcase the detrimental impact that shifting definitions of schizophrenia had on Black men, and the implications of that history for CRT debates in the present-day.

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