A lecture presented by the National Library of Medicine will explore the history of racism in mental healthcare in the South and the present-day ramifications of it.
The lecture, titled “James H. Cassedy Lecture in the History of Medicine: Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South,” will be presented on Thursday at 2 p.m. EDT and will be given by Kylie Smith, an associate professor at Emory University. Smith’s lecture will focus on racial segregation in psychiatric hospitals in states such as Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi in 1969, arguing they were supported by racist ideologies, according to the National Institutes of Health.
“In this lecture Dr. Smith will … demonstrate that racial segregation in psychiatric hospitals in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi was supported by underlying racist ideologies and has had long term consequences for psychiatric care in the South,” the lecture’s description reads.
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Black patients were admitted into state hospitals and were kept “strictly segregated” inside, sometimes by “an entirely different facility hundreds of miles away” from the other patients, Smith said. The segregation made way for the patients not to be treated equally and not to be given the same care and treatment, with black patients suffering from “abuse, neglect, violence, and forced labor” as a result of the inequality, Smith told Circulating Now.
The segregation has led to consequences in the present day, including structural and ideological consequences, Smith claimed. Black people remain more likely than other patients to be wrongly diagnosed with schizophrenia, Smith said as evidence of the inequality, citing data from her research.
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Smith works as an associate professor for nursing and the humanities and associate faculty in Emory’s Department of History, where she teaches courses on the history of race in healthcare, critical theory, and nursing theory and philosophy, according to the school.
