The session description for this Webinar on Neuroscience and Psychiatry explains neuropsychiatry as “engaged with understanding the link between mind, body and behavior.” My presentation reminds us that these connections of mind-body-behavior when understood out of the context of a broader engagement with history itself have occasioned the field’s worst abuses, including the current ones. As the greatest example, today in the United States ninety percent of state psychiatric beds are in jails and prisons, institutions that confine disproportionate numbers of African Americans—what author Michelle Alexander termed The New Jim Crow.

In December 1842, the Georgia State Lunatic Idiot and Epileptic Asylum was opened.  A hundred years later, it had become at times the largest state hospital in the world with over ten thousand patients— an institution that was infamous as the worst of the worst in a post-War period when US state mental hospitals were recognized as “the shame of the states.”  Today the largest mental institution in Baldwin County (its Georgia location) is the county jail.  The largest such institution in Georgia is Atlanta’s Fulton County Jail system.  The largest in the United States is Chicago’s Cook County Jail. It is a situation that in 2014 the US Sheriffs Association finally found an “incomprehensible” in the grotesquery of such public policy.

But of course comprehend it we can.  Discovered archival accounts of historical characters admitted to the Georgia asylum show how modern US psychiatric practice in state asylums was forged in the traumas of settler colonialism:  conquest and removal of Indigenous peoples, the transatlantic slave trade, the plantation system of the Deep South, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow.  It evolved in the 20th century along with eugenic practices encouraged by a global eugenics movement that climaxed in Nazi Germany. Narrowly biomedical models bob atop this turbulent southern and US history, ignoring the causative historical factors in the “designation, prevention, study and treatment of mental disorders” that has constituted psychiatry.  As but one example, far from originating in the 1990s, neurosurgeries — such as sterilizations (by 1900) and lobotomies (from the 1930s) — were permitted and abetted by such an excision of the histories of colonization and empire and afterlives of slavery in our understandings of “mind, body, and behavior” that still haunt psychiatry today.   Or, from a 1900 annual report, the brief and casual mention of iron cages used in restraining excited patients by placing them naked in the Georgia sun — the same technologies used by convict lease and chain gang systems then-current in Georgia.   Or the use of “occupational therapy” in by African American patients growing cotton.

Fuller-Maathai Professor Emeritus, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, Connecticut College, New London, CT