Spiritual Madness: Race, Psychiatry and African American Religions (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Spiritual Madness: Race, Psychiatry and African American Religions
Abstract: As the nineteenth century drew to a close, white American psychiatrists declared that mental illness among African Americans in the South had reached alarming proportions and argued that, in a notable percentage of these cases, “religious excitement” was the key precipitating factor. This talk explores late nineteenth and early twentieth-century psychiatric theories about race, religion, and the “normal mind” and shows how the emerging specialty of psychiatry drew on works from history of religions to make racialized claims about African Americans’ “traits of character, habit, and behavior.” This history of the intersections of psychiatry and African American religions sheds light on how ideas about race, religion, and mental normalcy shaped African American experience in courts and mental hospitals and on the role the racialization of religion played more broadly in the history of medicine, legal history, and the history of disability.
Author: Judith Weisenfeld
Date: 10/3/2018
Location: New York University, Program in Religious Studies, Lerner Lecture on Religion and Society
Spiritual Madness: Race, Psychiatry and African American Religions (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Spiritual Madness: Race, Psychiatry and African American Religions
Abstract: As the nineteenth century drew to a close, white American psychiatrists declared that mental illness among African Americans in the South had reached alarming proportions and argued that, in a notable percentage of these cases, “religious excitement” was the key precipitating factor. This talk explores late nineteenth and early twentieth-century psychiatric theories about race, religion, and the “normal mind” and shows how the emerging specialty of psychiatry drew on works from history of religions to make racialized claims about African Americans’ “traits of character, habit, and behavior.” This history of the intersections of psychiatry and African American religions sheds light on how ideas about race, religion, and mental normalcy shaped African American experience in courts and mental hospitals and on the role the racialization of religion played more broadly in the history of medicine, legal history, and the history of disability.
Author: Judith Weisenfeld
Date: 10/9/2018
Location: Dartmouth College, Department of Religion, Orr Lecture on Culture and Religion
Spiritual Madness: Race, Psychiatry and African American Religions (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Spiritual Madness: Race, Psychiatry and African American Religions
Abstract: As the nineteenth century drew to a close, white American psychiatrists declared that mental illness among African Americans in the South had reached alarming proportions and argued that, in a notable percentage of these cases, “religious excitement” was the key precipitating factor. This talk explores late nineteenth and early twentieth-century psychiatric theories about race, religion, and the “normal mind” and shows how the emerging specialty of psychiatry drew on works from history of religions to make racialized claims about African Americans’ “traits of character, habit, and behavior.” This history of the intersections of psychiatry and African American religions sheds light on how ideas about race, religion, and mental normalcy shaped African American experience in courts and mental hospitals and on the role the racialization of religion played more broadly in the history of medicine, legal history, and the history of disability.
Author: Judith Weisenfeld
Date: 04/02/2019
Location: Sacramento State University, Festival of the Arts