Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South
Kylie Smith, PhD
Assistant Professor and the Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow for Nursing and the Humanities at Emory University in Atlanta
Author of Talking Therapy: Knowledge & Power in American Psychiatric Nursing (2020) and Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South (forthcoming)
Abstract: Psychiatric hospitals in the United States have always functioned as spaces of both custody and care. In the mid 20th century legislation was passed in an attempt to improve conditions and treatment practices for patients, but these developments were delayed in the South due to an insistence on racial segregation. In this talk, I draw on extensive archival sources from my book in progress to show the ways that Southern psychiatric hospitals in the mid twentieth century had become home to many thousands of Black patients with mental and physical disability, where treatment and care was custodial at best, violent and abusive at worst. Yet these hospitals were also the scene of important Civil Rights activism in the 1960s which revealed the ways that psychiatry functioned as a tool of white supremacy. This activism led to the end of segregation, but it could not fix the racism that underpins the provision of mental health and disability care today.
This project is funded by the G13 Grant from the National Library of Medicine and will be published by UNC Press in 2023.
CF Reynolds History of Medicine Lecture Series
Online. Password is 684488.