Author Judith Weisenfeld unpacks historic links between religion, race and psychiatry
(RNS) — Princeton University scholar Judith Weisenfeld has long studied the role of religion and race in America — but it wasn’t until recently that she discovered their historical and troubling intersection with psychiatry. Her new book, “Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery’s Wake” declares this finding: “there was no other group in American mental hospitals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for which attribution of mental illnesses to religious causes was as prominent as for African Americans.” Weisenfeld, 59, acknowledges how challenging it was to read the range of literature she researched for the book — including psychiatric studies, hospital and court records, and newspaper stories — but she remained determined to reveal the stories of individual patients who lived, labored and sometimes died in institutions after their behavior was labeled as superstitious and overly emotional. “It was difficult to read this profoundly racist psychiatric theory in the 19th century, to see how it was mobilized in the aftermath of the horrific institution of slavery with the aim, …
