The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease by Jonathan M. Metzl.

This is probably more academic than useful to someone as a practitioner, but I feel the need to share it, and I am not sure with whom. I think if some of administrators, who know nothing about mental health care would read this, it might help them to understand what is needed in mental health care in prisons, but of course, that is like wishing for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. 

I recently read The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease   by Jonathan M. Metzl. The Protest Psychosis I am not sure how much I agree with a lot of his premises, especially evaluating the use of schizophrenia and schizophrenic in the media, including popular, but not scientific, media but there were some interesting ideas and information advanced in the book.  Most of it was based on information from the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, in Ionia, Michigan

One of the saddest was in Part V, about Rasheed Karim, in 1967.  His story is not too dissimilar to many we hear today.   He was committed to the Ionia State Hospital, because he was attacked, and in defending himself, assaulted police.  But this part of the book is not just about his ongoing attempts to be released from Ionia State Hospital.  It also refers to the 1963 Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act.  I think you might recall the de-institutionalization of mental health patients, with the promise of community support programs that did not materialize.   This was supposed to be “cost saving” but I suspect it cost more than keeping people in institutions, as expensive as that was, because in the community, everyone HAD to have individualized care plans, and individual care providers. 

This section of the book goes on to describe how the Ionia State Hospital became the Riverside Correctional Facility, and the warehousing of the mentally ill who would have previously been in a “state hospital.”   Skyview, in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice system, was originally on the grounds of the Rusk State Hospital, and sadly, became a TDCJ treatment facility.  Hopefully, treatment before the Ruiz judgement was not just warehousing.  The Montford Unit, in Lubbock, Texas,  is in existence because of the Ruiz judgement.  But  the letter of the law of the Ruiz judgement does not reflect the spirit of the law  in terms of what is provided for treatment today.