The Dark Landscape of His Own Mind: Historicizing Representations of Black Madness in American Psychiatry and African American Ethnography and Fiction, 1910–50

Using archival and published descriptions of Black patients in U.S. mental hospitals and outpatient clinics , this paper will explore the “racial particularity” of manifestations of mental disorders in Black psychiatric patients between the onset of the WWI era Great Migration and the end of World War II—this period is crucial for both the development of psychiatry as a medicalized profession and for the pivotal social processes unleashed by African American migration and urbanization. This paper will further juxtapose the representation of Black madness in scientific studies with the image of Black insanity and its meaning within African American folk culture and black fiction writing. A recurring theme in the scientific literature focusing upon Black Americans and mental disorders, was the difficulty of anamnesis: the taking of life history with aim of diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. This paper suggests that it is in this trope of blocked, limited, or impossible communication between the psychiatrist and Black patient that historians might obtain significant insight into the stakes of introspection for African Americans during the post-Reconstruction Jim Crow era. This is so, because identifying, understanding, and addressing the sources and possible therapies for “madness” among African Americans required getting inside putatively diseased Black minds (spirit & psyche) and brains (body & matter). And yet, for Black Americans interiority, inside of the mind, remained one of the only spheres that was, by definition, free from the immediate domination of antiblack laws and extralegal terror restricting the ambit of Black humanity. By focusing then on scientific and lay interpretations of the relationship between blackness and madness in the early 20^th Century, this paper seeks to historicize interiority and introspection as distinctive scales and sites of considering Black American experiences and interpretations of mental health and mental illness.