Racist Ways and Mental Health Problems

It was reported in The Guardian on 03 Feb 10 (see link, below), that there has been an ‘epidemic’ of schizophrenia among African Caribbean men in the UK. That echoes a time past when Irish people living in the UK were undoubtedly perceived to be, as mad as cut snakes. Now, it is people from the Caribbean who attract the attention of the mental health machine and thus are over-scrutinised, over-identified and over-treated as a precaution, a ‘just in case approach’ which in turn relies on feeding the fear of violence. Schizophrenia=violence, right? Wrong. Psychosis might only become problematic when tinged not just with thoughts of harm to self or others but also, psycho-active substances that can play havoc with that psychosis. One of the greatest myths about schizophrenia, in fact, is the positive association between what is an unproven disorder and the potential for violence. What the anti-psychiatrists (Laing, Esterson, Szasz, et al.) (see, for example, www.szasz.com) were so correct in arguing in the 1960s, and what the mental health machine can now no longer ignore, is that what we call ‘schizophrenia’ is indeed a cobbled together mish-mash of culturally bound symptoms, that in large measure owe their aetiology to disturbances of context, not of mind per se. So just as once upon a time, the Irish in the UK were subjected to gross discrimination, harassment and vilification, now African Caribbeans are suffering a similar fate. The maddening that needs to be addressed is the racism within the perpetrators, not the responses of the hapless gentlemen who are kept so unfortunately under the perpetual gaze of a government hell-bent on social control.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/feb/03/mental-illness-bme-campaign

Postscript: There is much debate in the UK over exactly how many young black men are on the government’s DNA database (see link, below).

http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/uk/factcheck+black+men+on+the+dna+database/3436397