February 4, 2022
The Unapologetic Guide to Black Mental Health: Navigate an Unequal System, Learn Tools for Emotional Wellness, and Get the Help You Deserve
by Rheeda Walker, PhD
This book is written by an African-American psychologist for a general Black audience, but therapists can benefit immensely from reading this to better understand Black perspectives and experiences with mental health, and cultural factors that intersect with mental health. This paperback could be great for music therapy students and interns, and it’s also useful and relevant for experienced professionals. If you have a personal library of therapy books, this one is a great addition.
Not All Black Girls Know How to Eat: A Story of Bulimia
by Stephanie Covington Armstrong
Eating disorder treatment is an area of mental health that is dominated by whiteness. This memoir traces Stephanie Covington Armstrong’s experiences as a Black woman with an eating disorder, following her in and out of treatment. Stephanie reflects on how being a Black woman impacted her health and her treatment.
The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease
by Jonathan Metzl
Jonathan Metzl is a psychiatrist, and this is a historical study of the racialization of the diagnosis of schizophrenia as seen at the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, a notorious mental asylum which transitioned into Ionia State Prison in the 70s. Metzl sorts through the historical documentation, looking at the records of 800 patients turned inmates, carefully explaining his methodology to the reader, to show that schizophrenia – once associated with white women who committed nonviolent petty crime or were not performing properly as wives and mothers – became associated with Black men who were labeled dangerous. Going even further, Metzl documents how Black men’s participation in the Civil Rights movement became evidence of the diagnosis of schizophrenia, and thus a rationale for indefinite detainment in a mental hospital.
People often qualify for music therapy services through a diagnosis, so music therapists must understand how these diagnostic labels were created throughout history. Diagnostic labels are not cold, objective scientific constructs in the way we can diagnose diabetes or anemia; rather, they are cultural creations of the white, Western medical system, and our diagnostic constructs change wildly as the culture changes. Other examples include changing diagnostic understandings of LGBTQ+ identity (something I write about in a forthcoming publication).
This text is incredibly well-researched and offers important insights for music therapists as we engage with a system of diagnostic labels and the people whose lives are shaped by them.