History This Week: A Century of Stigma for Black America and Mental Health

As the 2020 Census rolls on, it’s an especially appropriate time to revisit the practice called for by our Constitution that determines not only the population of our country, but federal spending and congressional representation.

The podcast HISTORY This Week explores what happened in 1840 as U.S. Marshals went door to door conducting the sixth-ever census in the United States. That marked the first time the U.S. government included a question about mental health. The results were tragic and long-lasting. Twenty-one years before the Civil War erupted, with over two million enslaved people in America, the question fed and upheld a racist and pernicious lie that was spreading throughout America at the time: freedom causes African Americans to go insane. 

Episode 24, A Century of Stigma for Black America and Mental Health, is available now. Listen here.

To learn more about diagnostic biases and discrimination, we spoke with Made of Millions board member, Dr. Jody Adewale, about the history of Black mental health in America. Here's what he had to say.

The history of mental health in the United States is dualistic in nature. U.S. mental health research and treatment has been an olive branch based in empathy for the benefit of those suffering; while at the same time it has been a weapon used to rationalize slavery and present evidence to show that such oppression is in the service of the oppressed. Where you find yourself on this dichotomy had - and continues to have - everything to do with the color of your skin and the amount of wealth and power you hold.

In 1851, Drapetomania was a proposed mental illness that an American physician Samuel A. Cartwright hypothesized as the cause of enslaved Africans fleeing captivity. He explained Africans fleeing slavery had a mental health condition where they felt debilitating inadequacy to their master triggering an overwhelming desire to flee. Running away was out of insecurity of not being a "good enough slave." (Side note: I would love to hear Harriet Tubman's response to such lunacy). This is just one form of systematic and calculated attempts to rationalize the abhorrent behavior of owning slaves. 

History shows theories, studies, and census information that led to incorrect data on mental health in the United States. This has had a lasting effects; contributing to improper treatment options and US citizens blind to the realities of their own vulnerability to mental dysfunction and/or possible mental illness.

The multifaceted and complex trauma that African Americans have faced in the United States has potentially increased a greater risk of suffering from anxiety, depression, PTSD and other severe problems embedded in the collective unconscious. This has led to a natural fight, flight, or freeze response within the African American community desperate to preserve mental survival in a country that threatens it on a daily basis. These responses may include self medicating and healthy paranoia of systems that have not only failed them in the past, but have worked to threaten their freedom. 

To an outside observer, he or she may see these responses by and African American community or individual to the system, and label him or her as having a mental illness. There is a difference in having a mental health condition and being a person who is struggling to maintain a sense of self, sanity, dignity, family, respect, safety in an environment that threatens it daily. 

Is this a disorder? Or is this simply self preservation. 

As our country continues to wrestle with the racial divide embedded in our psyches and systems, we need to solidify mental health treatment, research and census data to one function and one function only; providing sound ethical data rooted in empathizing and caring for our fellow human, because mental illness does not discriminate.