“Hysteria” as a diagnosis is almost 4,000 years old. Back in Ancient Egypt, women whose behavior deviated from accepted norms were given medications by doctors for their hysteria. Only women could be hysterical, which is why the name itself comes from the Greek word for uterus — hystera. Women who behaved abnormally were thought to have problems related to the uterus wandering around the body, being in the wrong position, or having various defects. Egyptian doctors would put medication on the vulva to encourage the uterus to return to its normal position. Greek doctors would give women medication to make the uterus healthy. Later, Christian doctors would perform exorcisms to relieve the womb of demonic possessions. Some of the behaviors that led to a diagnosis of hysteria were an inability to have children or the lack of desire to get married.
So, if you were a woman living in pre-modern times who had a miscarriage, had a stressful menopause, or didn’t want to be stuck to a man for the rest of your life, you may end up with a strong salve between your legs, medications that make you sick, or a priest telling Satan to get out of your uterus.
The first recorded instances of hysteria were around 1900BC, and from then up through the 17th Century, hysteria was considered a physical illness that a doctor could diagnose. In the late 1600s, there was a shift in the scientific community and hysterical women were now thought to have a mental illness instead of a physical one. Since mental illness was (and still is in many ways) poorly understood, women who behaved badly were put into asylums. Men in medicine diagnosed women with hysteria for a wide range of symptoms from seizures and hallucinations to being annoying and not knowing their place in society. If you’re a man whose wife doesn’t follow the societal norms of the time, you get her diagnosed with “female hysteria” and a doctor prescribes some pills to knock her out. You could also choose to have her sent away, either to the country to get some air (if you like her), or to an asylum to be locked up (if you don’t).
Psychiatry was a convenient resource to rid men of women who questioned their authority. One of the most famous cases is that of Christine Collins, a single mother whose son was abducted in 1928.
The nationwide publicity made the LAPD look bad and, after they found the wrong boy and tried to convince Collins it was her son, the captain of the police department had her committed to a psychiatric ward.
Captain Jones called her a lunatic and claimed she was trying to get the state to take care of her child and believed she was just trying to embarrass the police department. He threw her into a psychiatric ward in Los Angeles County General Hospital on a “Code 12” which allowed police to get rid of troublemakers by throwing them into psychiatric hospitals.
(cont. Crime Museum)
Collins was eventually released and sued the department twice (winning the second one, though she never received her payment ordered by the court), and California made it illegal for the cops to put someone in a psych ward without a warrant.
“Drapetomania” was a mental illness invented by a pro-slavery physician in 1851. Drapetes is Greek for “runaway slave” and mania is Greek for “madness or frenzy” so we have another illness with Greek root words, to make it sound important, thrown at a disenfranchised community. Samuel A. Cartwright was a typical white man in the antebellum South who believed Blacks were inferior to whites, and it was one of his missions to “prove” it scientifically in order for slave-owning whites to have a factual line of reasoning for keeping Africans and their descendants in chains.
A slave running away from captivity wasn’t just another human longing to be free — that slave was afflicted with drapetomania. Blacks were supposed to love slavery, and it was up to slave-owners to ensure that love by treating their slaves like children.
If treated kindly, well fed and clothed, with fuel enough to keep a small fire burning all night — separated into families, each family having its own house — not permitted to run about at night to visit their neighbors, to receive visits or use intoxicating liquors, and not overworked or exposed too much to the weather, they are very easily governed — more so than any other people in the world. If any one or more of them, at any time, are inclined to raise their heads to a level with their master or overseer, humanity and their own good requires that they should be punished until they fall into that submissive state which was intended for them to occupy. They have only to be kept in that state, and treated like children to prevent and cure them from running away.
(cont. PBS)
On the other hand, if treating them like children didn’t work, you should cut off their big toes so they can’t run. Or just whip them. Those are the only two options — infantilization or brutal violence. (x)
Slaves who wanted to be free had a mental illness, but what about free Negroes? They needed a mental illness as well, so whites could justify their brutal treatment of all Black people. Cartwright had an answer for that too: dysaesthesia aethiopica, which basically meant all Black people were lazy unless prodded by whites to be productive. Slaves were naturally lazy, but if you gave them a structured workday and just enough food and a clean place to sleep, you could keep dysaesthesia aethiopica at bay. One of the symptoms was skin insensitivity, so the slave should be washed, oiled, whipped, then put to work in the sunshine. (x) Another symptom was skin lesions…which would be caused by whipping. Cartwright had built a circular argument in support of brutalizing Black people.
There was no hope for free Negroes. They were all lazy because they didn’t have any white people to tell them what to do.
On the other side of that coin, too much initiative could also result in a diagnosis of mental illness. In 1958, the University of Mississippi was still an all-white institution of higher learning, and Clennon Washington King, Jr. sought to change that. He applied as a graduate student, but he never made it past registration.
In the summer of 1958 King attempted to enter the graduate program in history at the University of Mississippi. No African American had ever applied to the university, and the white power structure struck back quickly and devastatingly. When King arrived in Oxford to register, Gov. J. P. Coleman, members of the state highway patrol, and several plainclothes officers greeted him. After forcibly removing King from the registration area, state authorities carried him to jail. Two physicians then declared King insane, and he spent nearly two weeks in a state asylum before his younger brother, civil rights lawyer C. B. King, secured his release.
(cont. Mississippi Encyclopedia)
Inconvenient Black people are still sent away when white people are uncomfortable. I started thinking about the abusive history of psychiatry this weekend when I saw a story from a Black man who worked at Cards Against Humanity and was locked up by his bosses because he wanted to keep the n-word out of the game.
Nicolas Carter was the only Black person in the original writing room, and he spent much of his time at CAH censoring himself because he needed the job. Speaking up can get you fired. Once he got a job elsewhere and CAH became a secondary source of income, his disposition changed. Not only was he less stressed about money (and therefore in a more positive headspace), he wasn’t as afraid to bring criticisms to the floor because he wasn’t afraid of losing his job.
That positive attitude alongside his newfound ability to tell white people when they were wrong landed him in a psychiatric ward.
From what I’ve been able to gather, Andy, Jo, Jack, and Eunji felt that my behavior had changed so dramatically that I must have been facing a mental break. One of the side-effects of having money was my mood improving, who could have known, and the combination of me saying what I really thought and being happy didn’t seem like my normal self to them.
Andy reached out to my sister who was a senior in college. He told her that I was going to be disciplined at work for my behavior and could lose my job, which so frightened my parents that they drove from New York to Chicago overnight. My dad came to my apartment and asked me to “see someone.” I agreed, since I was imagining a therapist on a couch asking me if I was suicidal. He drove me to Illinois Masonic, where the combination of my parents’ concern and the collateral of a co-worker who was operating with the head writer were enough to have me forcibly kept there.
I was admitted on a Friday at 6pm so I didn’t see a psychiatrist until Monday. She was tall, blonde and flanked by two med students. When I told her I had been in a stressful home environment growing up due to poverty and the fact that my parents told me I had to be better than the white boys to compete, she told me that was preposterous. Why would two anti-racist scholars teach their son to see white boys as competitors? Anti-racists would teach their son that race didn’t matter at all. I asked her if we could bring a single person of color into the room besides me to illustrate how common I felt it was to be taught this, she said no. She later listed my concerns as “spontaneous delusions” on “racial topics.”
I had realized I needed to lie to get out after my conversation with the psychiatrist, so I spit my 5mg Abilify pills into the water fountain and said I was grateful until they let me out after five days.
(cont. Medium)
4000 years after women were vaginally medicated for not wanting to have children, 150 years after Black people were whipped to cure the mental illness of laziness, 100 years after a woman was locked up for knowing a runaway boy was not her child, and 60 years after a Black man was put in a mental institution for the crime of wanting to go to a white school, we have a Black man admitted against his will because he didn’t want his bosses to put the n-word into a card game.
Psychiatry is a great help to many people (self included) but psychiatry has frequently been used by those in power (usually white men) to rid themselves of inconvenient undesirables. If your experience with psychiatry falls along those lines, remember you’re not alone and that there are caregivers who recognize this and will treat you with the respect you deserve. Do your research and seek recommendations from people you trust. And if you know someone who needs emergency assistance, make sure you do your research before you turn them over to a profession with a history of gaslighting and marginalization.
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