Under the Strain of Color: Harlem's Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry (Cornell Studies in the History of Psychiatry) - Hardcover

Mendes, Gabriel N.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080145350X ISBN 13: 9780801453502

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2015

Synopsis

In Under the Strain of Color, Gabriel N. Mendes recaptures the history of Harlem's Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic, a New York City institution that embodied new ways of thinking about mental health, race, and the substance of citizenship.

The result of a collaboration among the psychiatrist and social critic Dr. Fredric Wertham, the writer Richard Wright, and the clergyman Rev. Shelton Hale Bishop, the clinic emerged in the context of a widespread American concern with the mental health of its citizens. Mendes shows the clinic to have been simultaneously a scientific and political gambit, challenging both a racist mental health care system and supposedly color-blind psychiatrists who failed to consider the consequences of oppression in their assessment and treatment of African American patients. Employing the methods of oral history, archival research, textual analysis, and critical race philosophy, Under the Strain of Color contributes to a growing body of scholarship that highlights the interlocking relationships among biomedicine, institutional racism, structural violence, and community health activism.

About this title

About the Author

Gabriel N. Mendes is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies and of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of California, San Diego.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 080145350X
• ISBN 13: 9780801453502
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208