Video: Black Religion and Mental Health Symposium Keynote, "Black Freedom and the Racialization of Religious Excitement in American Psychiatry” by Dr. Judith Weisenfeld

June 04, 2024

Professor Ahmad Greene-Hayes (Harvard Divinity School) and Professor George Aumoithe (FAS, History and African and African American Studies) proposed this two-day interdisciplinary symposium, integrating mind, brain, and behavior insights into the exploration of Black religious practices and their impact on mental health. They questioned how Black religious spaces can enhance mental health outcomes, considering their dual role as sanctuaries and potential impediments to open discourse.

The symposium brought together experts from history, public health, psychiatry, African American studies, religious studies, and civic society, focusing on understanding the neurobiological and socio-behavioral dynamics contributing to mental health stigmatization within Black communities. The symposium aimed to illuminate how societal stressors, such as racism, influence brain function and behavior, thereby affecting mental health, while also exploring resilience mechanisms among Black religious communities. This project aligns with the Harvard Mind Brain Behavior Interfaculty Initiative’s mission of facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration to address complex issues, contributing to a broader understanding of the interplay between mind, brain, and behavior in the context of Black mental health.

This event took place on February 29, 2024.

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SPEAKER: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER: Black Freedom and the Racialization of Religious Excitement in American Psychiatry. February 29th, 2024.

MARLA FREDERICK: Good evening, everyone. It is my pleasure to welcome you all to this weekend symposium on Black Religion and Mental Health. Thank you for joining us, both in person and those of you who are online. Before we begin the formal program, I'd like to acknowledge the professors.

Ahmad Greene-Hayes and George Aumoithe. Did I say that right?

SPEAKER: Aumoithe.

MARLA FREDERICK: Aumoithe. See? I should have pronounced it before I got on stage. George Aumoithe who proposed this interdisciplinary symposium, integrating mind brain and behavior insights into the exploration of Black religious practices and their impact on mental health.

As you will see over the next two days, Ahmad and George have brought together a stunning array of experts across many fields, including African-American studies, civics, history, psychiatry, public health, and religious studies with a focus on understanding the neurobiological and psychobehavioral dynamics contributing to mental health stigmatization within Black communities.

Some Mae wonder what religion has to do with neurobiology, and the need for mental health support. To that, I say, you are absolutely in the right place at the right time. Throughout the symposium, the following question will be explored, how can Black religious spaces enhance mental health outcomes considering these spaces dual role as both sanctuaries and potential impediments to open discourse?

In my own research with religion and inequality, a topic that I spent more than a year exploring as president of the American Academy of Religion in 2021, the many multifaceted intersections of religion with our lives came into clearer focus. As we wrestled with the intersections of race and class and religion, it was clear that religion often plays a significant role in people's lives from our most private moments to the grandest of public scales.

To reiterate a point that I made with AAR, religion can aid and abet just as it disrupts and averts. It can act as both a wound and a salve, a virus, if you will, and a vaccine. And no less so when we think about the intersections between religion and mental health, and we as scholars and supporters of scholarly work are called upon to make sense of it all to help disaggregate the parts into a meaningful and coherent whole.

To foster excellence in the academic study of religion and enhance the public understanding of religion and its many intersections with our daily life is a lofty charge, indeed, but ever more needed in these particular times. As higher education faces division and conflict and public scrutiny, I want to the deep importance of the work that we do here at Harvard Divinity School.

We are a community that stands on three pillars, academics, ministry, and religion and public Life. And while we study intently the nature of religious conflict, whether it is the scriptural texts and interpretations that give rise to it, or the historical nature of it, we also hold in tension the reality that religion has been and can be a powerful force for good in the world.

I truly thank each of you, faculty, staff, alumni, students, and friends for your commitment to the teaching and learning that happens here at Harvard Divinity School and around the globe with the vital connections you all make near and far. One last note of appreciation before we welcome Dr. Judith Weisenfeld, a good friend and an extraordinary scholar to the stage for her keynote address.

This symposium came to fruition, in large part, to our organizers, Ahmad Greene-Hayes and George Aumoithe-- so the spelling is so different from the sound so every time I look at it, I get confused, but it's in my head before I look at it-- who exemplify what it means to amplify teaching and learning through connections that defy academic and geographic boundaries.

Thank you for creating a forum for colleagues from across Harvard and across the United States to delve into critical discussions about Black religion and mental health. Thank you both. Appreciate it. George.

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GEORGE AUMOITHE: Good evening, everyone. How are you? Hope you're well. So I'm Dr. George Aumoithe. I am an assistant professor of History and African-American Studies in the faculty of Arts and Sciences. And first of all, I'd really like to thank the Mind Brain and Behavior Institute for allowing us to co-convene, Dr. Ahmad Greene-Hayes and I, across two schools to have this really important interdisciplinary conversation that I think is also timely and very important for us to hold.

So I just want to provide a little bit of framing around the sort of professional context for our convening today. According to the Association of Black Psychologists, of 1.2 million behavioral health providers in the US in 2020 nationally, 4% of psychologists, 2% of psychiatrists, 7% of marriage and family counselors, 11% of professional counselors, and 22% of social workers are Black.

While these ratios represent a numerical improvement from the early 20th century, state of Black mental health representation where scholars like Elizabeth Lunbeck and our very own Martin Summers have identified a handful of professional psychologists and psychiatrists who provided care in the immediate post-war period, Black people remain underrepresented in the highest echelons of professional care.

We also need to think about certain lingering issues, lingering issues, such as the mistreatment of patients in psychiatric wards, or the violence emanating out of encounters with police as first responders, or even the violence emerging from vigilante actors who intervene when someone is in distress illustrated by the tragic killing of Jordan Neely by former Marine Daniel Penny after Penny placed Neely in an extended chokehold on a New York City subway.

Whether the historically poor representation of Black people in mental health professions or understanding Black people's indigenous mental health practices and how they intersect with our spiritual one's practices, our symposium promises to deepen our historical and practical knowledge.

Today, we begin with Dr. Judith Weisenfeld's whose research on the racialization of religious excitement and American psychiatry. Tomorrow, we hear from historians, religious, scholars, community organizers, policy experts, and mental health practitioners who will shed light on the intersection of Black religious communities and the acceptance of and stigma against mental health care.

In our dialogue, one question we might ponder as a group is, how do we seize the opportunities inherent to open dialogue and avoid the pitfalls of historic distrust between religious and mental health institutions? Over tonight's talk and tomorrow's plenary gathering, I look forward to exploring institutional accountability and identifying non-institutional practices and solutions.

But I also hope we can explore the structure around care, structures that include housing, education, and treatment for without an awareness of this overarching structure within our discussion of the intersection between religion and mental health access, we leave with a potentially incomplete picture of the social problems that confront us.

So on that note and to get to why we are all here, I want to warmly welcome Dr. Ahmad Greene-Hayes to introduce today's opening keynote. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

AHMAD GREENE-HAYES: Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you to Dean Frederick and Dr. Aumoithe for those wonderful comments, getting us started this evening. I want to also provide some framing, though, from the context of the study of Black religion for our gathering.

I think it's important to note that at the time when we proposed this symposium to the interfaculty initiative for Mind Behavior and Brain study, we were thinking in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and also, we were thinking collectively about the incessant threats on Black people's lives wherein mental health awareness remains a pivotal point of public health discourses.

And so this gathering came about immediately in the wake of the violent murder of Jordan Neely, a Black homeless man who was strangled to death by Daniel Penny, a white vigilante. Neely's death like the deaths of so many Black people across the globe was recorded and circulated across the internet.

Neely, who struggled with mental health challenges, poverty, and houselessness was deemed unworthy and his predicament a site for spectacle on a New York City subway train as onlookers recorded but did not intervene to save his Black life. Whether it be the everyday reality of anti-Black racism, the epigenetic memory of the transatlantic slave trade, including Harvard and the legacy of slavery or other biological, social, and political factors, many Black people like Neely live with depression, anxiety, and other mental health disorders.

Like our enslaved ancestors who lived in disabled bodies because of the brutal whip of the slave master, and the planter class, many people of African descent also navigate mental disabilities in a world that actively shames the Black and disabled. In response to this reality, Black religious spaces, especially and often, perhaps too prominently, Black protestant churches are often situated as havens and sanctuaries to survive the pressures of living while Black in America.

Despite this historical reality, Black religious spaces struggle to discuss mental health awareness openly and transparently due largely to what the Harvard historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham long described as the politics of resectability in her 1993 book, Righteous Discontent.

So this evening, our keynote speaker, Dr. Judith Weisenfeld, will help us unpack this troubled legacy. Dr. Weisenfeld who also was my graduate advisor at Princeton University, and I'm very grateful for her mentorship and friendship now at this stage in my career, but she is the Agate Brown and George Collard Professor of Religion and the chair of the Department of Religion at Princeton University where she is also associated faculty in the Department of African-American studies, and the Program in Gender and Sexuality studies.

She is a scholar of African-American religious history. Her books include New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity During the Great Migration, which won the 2017 Albert J. Raboteau prize for the best book in Africana Religions. She is also the author of Hollywood Be Thy Name: African-American Religion and American Film, 1929 to 1949, and African-American Women in Christian Activism: New York's Black YWCA, excuse me, 1905 to 1945.

She currently directs The Crossroads Project: Black Religious Histories, Communities and Cultures, which is supported by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. Her current research project, which I think the current title of the book, and correct me if I'm wrong, is Racial Commitments: African-American Religion and American Psychiatry is currently examining the intersections of psychiatry race and African-American religion in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Guggenheim Foundation.

She is a stellar scholar and thinker, and so we're so grateful to have her here at Harvard Divinity School. And so without further ado, if you can please greet her with a rousing round of applause. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

JUDITH WEISENFELD: Thank you, Ahmad and George. I'm really honored to have been invited to start this off. I'm really excited to be in conversation with everyone over the course of this symposium, to be here under the leadership of Dean Marla Frederick. I used to say Marla Frederick was my president back in the day when she was AR president. Now she's the dean.

All right. On September 2nd, 1893, 45-year-old Mae W. was committed to the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum having been declared by two physicians to be insane and their judgment, affirmed by a probate judge in Sumter County, where Mae lived.

It's not clear how Mae, a married farmer who belonged to the Methodist church and had most likely been born into slavery, had come to the attention of authorities, but it was his religious expression that persuaded the examining doctors, both white and one the son of a Methodist minister, that he was mentally ill.

The doctors testified that while they believed there were predisposing factors underlying his condition, and they named heredity and malaria, they felt the immediate cause of Mae's insanity, in the form of acute mania, was religious excitement manifested in what they characterized as the delusional belief that, quote, "He is in direct communication with the Holy Spirit." end quote.

Now there's a little more in Mae's patient record from the hospital than a transcription of the brief account contained in the commitment paperwork and an affirmation of the local doctor's initial diagnosis of acute mania caused by religious excitement. He was declared recovered and released from the asylum two months later.

Mae W.'s diagnosis of mania precipitated by religious excitement was common among southern Black people committed to asylums in the late 19th century. In the wake of slavery. And in a period during which African-Americans deemed mentally ill, increasingly came under the jurisdiction of these state hospitals, many of these hospitals listed religious excitement as among the most frequent precipitating causes for Black inmates.

Overall, unknown cause-- when one goes through the annual reports, and the records, unknown cause generally constitutes the highest number but religious excitement was often among the top listed supposed known causes. So this idea that religious excitement, religious excess, or improper religion from one's perspective that this could produce insanity was not new at this time in American history nor was the diagnosis, or the causal factor applied only to Black people in the United States. And there's a history beyond the US as well.

In the US, some medical religious and cultural authorities connected new forms of religious expressions to mental disorder over American history, pre-American history, including those of shakers in the 18th century, Christian scientists, millerites, Mormons, and spiritualists in the 19th century, and holiness and Pentecostal believers in the 20th century among others.

And recall that what the doctors who testified in May W.'s commitment hearing that what they found delusional was his belief in the possibility of a direct connection with the Holy Spirit, a characteristic of holiness theology which had become, by that time, a significant component of Black religious culture.

Even as medical authorities evaluated a range of religious expressions as disordered or potentially disordering, early white psychiatrists positioned African-Americans uniquely within a diagnostic and treatment frame premised on the notion of a racially distinctive mind that had particular religious manifestations, that structured their behavior as much as did individual experience.

So the idea of the racial mind is mobilized as much or more in some cases. White American doctors assigned religious causes to mental illness in patients from a variety of backgrounds across this period. So the application of religious excitement is not limited to African-Americans, but for no other group in American mental hospitals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was the attribution of mental illness to religious causes as prominent as for African-Americans.

So I argue in the book that over the course of this period, the idea of religious excitement as part of disordered mental state becomes racialized as Black. And here's one set of data for looking at that. This is data drawn from Virginia hospitals, which is useful because Central Hospital, the dark blue bar housed Black patients only, and the other hospitals had white patients.

And looking at, again, the attribution of religious excitement in annual reports over this period, you can see the disparity here. And I found this in other archives and other-- looking at other hospitals, state hospital reports. So religious excitement becomes racialized as Black, and the theories early white psychiatrists developed to account for what they believed was a connection between religion and mental illness for Black people extended beyond individual cases like Mae's to contribute to the larger corpus of race science that shaped American politics, public policy and daily life and pathologized Black cultures expressions and being.

In the larger project, I chart how ideas about religion came to occupy a prominent place in late 19th and early 20th century white doctor's theories of an essential Black mind, the essential nature of the Black mind and indeed, a central place in their own theories of religion.

Explore how the theories and practices these doctors developed and promoted influenced Black people's possibilities for enacting freedom and how by framing their religious expressions as potentially pathological. It's difficult to recover the experiences of patients like Mae W. who were diagnosed with religiously grounded mental illness and consigned to state hospitals, and you see here some of the commitment paperwork, and then the campus of that hospital and a slightly later period.

The records of the legal process through which Black-- through which people were committed to state mental hospitals, whether initiated at the request of family members or a directive from white authorities to evaluate an individual held in jail or resident in an almshouse or other institutions, these records privilege the voices of witnesses, particularly of local white doctors as well as family, neighbors, and sometimes white employers.

When patients perspectives are represented, they're generally second hand accounts offered by police, or the examining physicians and again, family, community witnesses, journalists, sometimes the cases become public. Surviving patient records from state hospitals in the late 19th century often contain little more than information transferred from the commitment paperwork as I've said.

On occasion, patient files contain correspondence from family members, and by the early 20th century, they might include photographs or daily ward notes, more extensive case histories when those come into use. Many records from state hospitals, particularly those for institutions that house Black patients only, have not been retained in state archives as was the case for the medical records of Virginia Central State Hospital as I mentioned.

Although the records of the hospitals for white patients in Virginia are in the state archives, and West Virginia's Lincoln State Hospital which I'll talk about later. And in other cases, health privacy laws restrict access to all patient records or limit access to those that date earlier than the late 19th century. So these are the constraints on this kind of research.

The available records, both legal and medical, though, offer some insight into the stakes and consequences of Black people being characterized as suffering from or manifesting a religious insanity in this period. Even the limited available records show the prominence of religious factors in diagnosis and allow us to see individuals who were grappling with generations of racial trauma and responding in and through religious vernacular.

But certainly not all determinations of insanity or commitments to hospitals in the late 19th century and early 20th century US can be attributed solely to white political and social efforts to marginalize and oppress Black people but racialized psychiatric theory about disordered religious minds affected individual experiences within the legal and medical systems that evaluated Black people's sanity in this period.

So in the project, I offer a broad analysis of the significance of racialized ideas about religion to early American psychiatry proceeding with some trepidation that comes with the work of charting the history of medical racism, and the questions about whether explicating racist thought and presenting it here and in writing, whether that simply reproduces the violence of history, and the archive.

But I think it's important to engage this history and to see how as white doctors asserted distinct disciplinary authority over the definitions of the normal, and the insane, they also worked to define the very category of religion in racialized ways situating white Protestantism as the norm.

Many of the early white psychiatrists or psychiatric theorists of religion, race and mental illness among African-Americans worked in southern state hospitals where Black patients were most likely to be treated. Most of them were active in mainstream Protestant churches, Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, Episcopalian and a striking number came from enslaving families or had themselves enslaved Black people.

And we can see, when we look at their context and their histories, how early racialized psychiatric theories that centered Black religions did not represent a contest between white secular medical authority and Black religious ways of knowing, but the engagement of two broad religious worldviews in contexts of unequal power and access to authorizing structures.

So I want to underscore, and I will, the religious basis of white doctors religious-- or interpretations of Black religion. In the first address before the members of the National Conference of Charities and Correction on the topic of insanity among people of African descent in the United States, superintendent of the South Carolina State Hospital for the Insane James Woods Babcock, a Presbyterian and son of a Confederate veteran expressed worry.

Babcock informed his fellow white physicians and social welfare workers that since the end of slavery, diagnoses of insanity among Southern African-Americans had increased rapidly and was placing great stress on the ability of institutions to deal with what he characterized as quote, "This constant accumulation of lunatics." end quote.

Citing federal census data, he charted a national increase from 175 colored insane per million inhabitants in 1850 to 886 per million in 1890. And he contended that while the reported proportion of insane people of African descent was higher in northern states in 1890, the increasing number in the south was striking.

Dr. Emil Perry, an active Baptist, son of a Confederate veteran and pathologist at the Georgia State sanitarium at Milledgeville, joined in this assessment from his perspective a few years later writing that quote, "In 40 years, the total Negro population of the state has been a little more than doubled while the number of insane has increased 20-fold. No other such rapid and radical change in the mental stability of a race is recorded in history." end quote.

So what did these white physicians think had caused this increase? As many historians have shown, Babcock contributed to a discourse, and he told his audience that day that he believed unfitness for freedom was the cause. He argued, and many white physicians in hospitals for the insane concurred, that emancipation had propelled formerly enslaved Black people into, in his words, a world of mental excitement from which he insisted, slavery had long shielded them. The mental disturbance-- wait till you hear it.

[LAUGHTER]

The mental disturbance late 19th and early 20th century white physicians believed Black freedom produce was not uniform, and they elaborated factors they imagined precipitated mental illness in what Baptist deacon and former enslaver JD Roberts who was a physician at North Carolina's Eastern Hospital called, the clash with civilization.

These precipitating factors included such things as heredity, senility, injury, alcoholism, syphilis, physical causes, but the certainty of white medical professionals that along with these religious excitement spurred by what Babcock described as agitating novelties in religion that religious excitement contributed significantly to psychological disorder in Black people is a striking feature of these accounts and other physicians concurred.

Methodist and union army veteran, Abe Richardson, who was-- served a term as the superintendent of the government hospital for the insane in Washington D.C. known as Saint Elizabeth's, he told the Washington Post in 1901 that there had been a dramatic increase in the number of patients admitted to the institution in recent years asserting that quote, "It is true that religious mania is a symptom of many of those admitted. All classes have increased in the same proportion with the exception of Negroes. They have gained most rapidly." End quote.

And here we see an example of diagnosis and description of the supposed cause of insanity for a patient at Saint Elizabeth's. We see Charles Kay, a North Carolina native was admitted to the hospital in 1896, diagnosed as suffering from acute mania caused by religious excitement.

And the hospital staff's daily ward notes indicate that he was occasionally violent, and they described him as imagining, quote, "That he is God and rules the world." end quote, and that he talked about the Bible and preaching the gospel constantly. Account Charles's condition seems to have improved over time, and he was moved successively into wards and buildings in which patients received somewhat less oversight and could be engaged in outdoor labor.

In the records that remain, his two recorded requests were to attend chapel as he was eager, this is from a later period, the chapel, quote, "Eager to prove that he could behave himself." end quote and to be able to work outside, both of which he was eventually allowed to do.

Charles died of coronary disease at the approximate age of 49, six years after being admitted to Saint Elizabeth's. Charles was like many other Black patients in American hospitals for the insane in this period who had likely been born into slavery and struggled financially after emancipation in ways that may have exacerbated or been exacerbated by mental illness.

White psychiatrists consideration of patients like Charles Kay among the growing number of diagnoses of mental illness among Black people invoked the disruptions of emancipation as the proximate social context and no doubt, the formerly enslaved experienced, tremendous stress and trauma.

But these explanations were grounded in a broader and more enduring field of racialized beliefs about normal and disordered minds and often the relation of religion to these states, and again, capacity for freedom, ideas about this. And here you see some of the titles of the published literature in this period.

None of the titles talk about religion, but religion is a very prominent factor within this body of literature. And you can see this kind of emerging specialty that these people announced, these doctors announced themselves, create themselves as race experts in this period.

The attention Babcock and other white doctors, mostly from southern hospitals, gave to the increase in diagnoses of mental illness among African-Americans in this period emerged within and contributed to the era's hardening systems of segregation and racial containment that shaped Charles' young adulthood.

Potential for incarceration in a variety of institutions, including jails, penitentiaries, Magdalene houses, and poor houses shadowed African-Americans in the Jim Crow era, and commitment to mental institutions loomed as another possibility. And indeed, many Black patients were sent to hospitals from county jails, prisons or poor houses. Charles was transferred from the almshouse.

In cases in which violence or crime occurred, the determination of criminal agency or mental illness took place through a combination of local legal, political, and social cultures along with medical standards of the day, including this body of theory about religious causes.

So in this period in which African-Americans were forging cultures in communities in slavery's wake, they came under the scrutiny of white psychiatrists, police, judges who applied racialized ideas about religion and mental normalcy, and they were sometimes, and again, increasingly, consigned to this expanding system of state and-- of state mental hospitals, local hospitals sometimes.

In accounting for and responding to what they saw as an emerging medical and social crisis, late 19th and early 20th century white psychiatrists produced theories of religion that became constitutive elements of their racialized understandings of the normal and disordered mind.

Now as a precipitating factor for mental illness, this idea of excessive religious excitement, as Georgia state sanitarium clinical director E.M. Green called it, and he was the son of a Presbyterian minister and grandson of an enslaver, this idea of excessive religious excitement was not a neutral notion.

Like so much about valuations of religion in American culture, interpretations of religious expression, whether restrained and appropriate or excited and excessive, these were often racialized and gendered as were assessments of theologies and forms of religious organization.

White psychiatrists frequently invoked religious beliefs, sensibilities and practices in their claims about the hereditary historical and social causes of mental instability among Black people, and they framed it, again, through the lens of white supremacy, American racial hierarchy, their own family investments in the economic exploitation of Black people and their own religious commitments, again, most often to Protestant denominations in this period.

So what were the main elements of these racialized theories of religion and mental normalcy? It was routine for white psychiatric practitioners to frame their addresses and publish studies about Black mental illness by constructing and rehearsing a trajectory from what they characterized as savagery with its religious connotations through enslavement to recent emancipation.

Saint Elizabeth's Hospital psychiatrist Mary O'Malley began her study of psychoses among Black people with the assertion that, quote, "Only 300 years ago, the Negro ancestors of this race were naked dwellers on the West Coast of Africa found by the slave traders in the depths of savagery and suddenly transplanted to an environment of the highest civilization. And 250 years later, had all the responsibilities of this higher race thrust upon them." end quote.

And while the many, many, many similar accounts that historian Martin Summers describes as rising to the level of genre, these many accounts mark change over time from Africa to the United States. White psychiatrists insisted on the lack of civilizational development or progress on the part of African-Americans.

John Lind, O'Malley's colleague at Saint Elizabeth's asserted in one study, quote, "Because he, the Negro, wears a palm beach suit instead of a string of cowries, his psychology is no less that than the African and betrays the savage heart beneath the civilized exterior." end quote.

And these medical evaluations of African and African-American culture claimed stunted growth because of cultural immaturity deriving from what these white psychiatrists presented as essential race traits. Another grounding assumption in these medical discussions about African-Americans and mental illness was that insanity did not exist among Africans in Africa.

American neurologist George M. Beard, the son of a congregationalist minister, who in 1869 described neurasthenia, a disease of nervous exhaustion, built his theory in part on the idea that Africans and Native Americans did not experience mental illness.

In his 1881 American Nervousness, he asserted with confidence, quote, "Where there is no civilization there is no nervousness no matter what the personal habits may be even though the experiment be made as in Africa for centuries." end quote. And for these theorists and medical practitioners, the idea that mental illness was largely absent in Africa did not serve as an argument for the hardiness or superiority of African psychology, but simply a backdrop for them to assert African-Americans essential unfitness for civilization as typified in American society, culture, and religion.

Another core component was the claim that slavery had been a benevolent institution for Black people's moral mental and physical health. From his position as superintendent of the eastern hospital in Goldsboro, North Carolina that housed exclusively Black patients, active Southern Methodist layman J.F. Miller whose family had enslaved dozens of Black people summed up the opinion of many white psychiatrists of the beneficial environment of slavery for Black people's mental and moral well-being.

Quote, "It is an undisputed fact known to our southern people that no race of men ever lived under better hygienic restraint or had governing their lives rules and regulations more conducive to physical health and mental repose. Freedom came to the Negro and a change came over his entire life." End quote.

So what did late 19th century psychiatrists mean when they diagnosed African-American patients as suffering from mental illness, either mania or melancholy in this period caused or precipitated by religious excitement? I see religious excitement as-- serving as an umbrella term that white psychiatrists discussed in relation to what they imagined as several constituent components of the Black psyche, and I'll talk about two here, superstition and emotionalism.

White psychiatrists mobilized ideas about African religions as not real religion and evaluated their Black patients references to certain understandings of the supernatural as indications of the racial trait of Negro superstition. These understandings of the supernatural included the Africana spiritual practice of conjure that combined mental and spiritual resources to heal or harm and mentions of supernatural beings like witches and their interactions with humans.

Saint Elizabeth's Hospital William Bevis asserted in 1921 that, quote, "Nothing in the life of the Negro stands out more prominently than his superstition. It influences his thought and conduct more than anything else. In no other trait or peculiarity do we find more plainly, the imprint of the primitive African life and customs." end quote.

Many white psychiatrists in this literature argued that what they viewed as African superstitions, as manifest in African-American life were all consuming and tyrannical. E.M. Green, again, the clinical director of the Georgia State sanitarium argued in 1914 that, quote, "From the cradle, the Negro lives in the fear of the supernatural.

As an infant, he is threatened with beasts, spooks, and witches. In childhood, the chief subject of conversation, which he overhears, subjects, are witchcraft, spells, ghosts, and conjuring. Every sickness is attributed to the agency of poison, every misfortune to that of witchcraft." end quote.

Now it's not uncommon in the records of commitment hearings to find African-Americans attributing mental disturbance to the effects of conjure. When 21-year-old Mary J. was brought from Richmond County Virginia jail in 1885 to stand before Justice of the Peace for a determination on her sanity, the examining physicians reported that religious excitement was the supposed cause of her illness, and that she complained, and here you can see, of being tricked or conjured.

Mary had been arrested and charged with disorderly conduct once before this, but in this case, it's likely that her assertion of belief in conjure, that is her investment in the spiritual system of regulating interpersonal relations and health through appeal to natural and supernatural forces that, that this claim of being tricked is what led the doctors-- to the doctor's characterization of her suffering from religious excitement and her commitment to the Central State Asylum for Colored Insane.

And there are many cases like this in the archives. In addition to the idea that African-Americans experienced a kind of mental terror because of their presumed racial propensity for superstitious belief and failure to relegate religion to a limited arena of life, psychiatric assessments of the state of Black mental health generally presented emotional and spiritual excess always set against moral and ethical concern as the substance of Black religion.

George's E.M. Green asserted that, quote, "The Negroes religious convictions are most superficial. And while a great churchgoer easily swayed by religious oratory and capable of religious-- excessive religious excitement, he has no realization of the basic principles of religion and gives way to all kinds of moral derelictions while professing deepest piety." end quote.

And again, this is a kind of generic statement that one finds in lots of his theory so these ideas about Black religious emotional excess would frame interpretations of Black church worship, of Black participation in late 19th century revivals and early 20th century Pentecostalism as well as a host of individual visionary and ecstatic religious expressions.

Such assertions by white commentators of what they believed was the nature of African and African diaspora religion, primitive, superstitious, emotional, lacking in ethics and morals, and even contagious, can be found in literature before the era of the professionalization of psychiatry and in a range of contemporaneous social scientific and theological literature. Curtis Evans has written very helpfully about this.

Something else is at stake, however, when such racialized theories of religion become part of a medical specialty that has the capacity to link long standing racialized constructions of deviant culture and religion to biological conceptions of the normal mind.

The racialized biology of mental normalcy and deviance factored in the transition in the 1910's and '20s from the diagnostic categories of mania and melancholy where then religious excitement was sometimes listed as a precipitating factor to dementia praecox in the 1910's and '20s, literally premature precocious dementia.

Dementia praecox and manic depressive psychosis came into widespread use in diagnoses of mental illness in the US through the work of German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin who theorized the psychosis as deriving from underlying metabolic factors common to all humans.

And Emil Kraepelin has a complicated history, but theoretically, it doesn't have an obvious racial frame to it. As embraced by American psychiatrists, race became an important factor in its application, supporting the idea, as historian Jonathan Metzl writes, that Black people were biologically unfit for freedom.

As white American psychiatrists deployed Kraepelin's new disease categories in the early 20th century, they linked racialized discourses about religion from the older diagnostic system to the new. And in fact, Kraepelin himself read these studies and was influenced by them-- by the way Americans, white American psychiatrists interpreted it.

So when Minnesota born active Methodist [? Ara ?] [? Everts, ?] a psychiatrist at Saint Elizabeth's Hospital turned her attention in the 1910's to research on dementia praecox among African-Americans, she highlighted literature from the history of religions as the interpretive key for diagnosing and treating Black patients.

She relied heavily on social anthropologist James G. Frazer's the Golden Bough first published in 1890 as she worked to consider the relationship among ancient human patterns, her ideas about innate Black racial traits, and her opinions on contemporary Black experience. So she was charting these three factors in a study assessing psychoses of the title, psychoses of the colored race.

So she argued for the importance in assessing psychosis of recognizing ontogenetic influences, the actual memories of individuals and phylogenetic or evolutionary inheritances, for her, seen most clearly in remnants of shared human religious expressions.

According to [? Everts, ?] what she's setting out to study again, are Black-- as the diagnostic categories change, she wants to know, are Black people more likely to suffer from this new disease or newly described disease? According to [? Everts, ?] Black and white patients were not entirely distinct in terms of the phylogenetic or evolutionary elements of their manifestations of dementia praecox.

And in this article, she gives the example of a white male patient at Saint Elizabeth's. She describes him as out of touch with reality. She says he has the mannerism-- quote, "The mannerism of standing with head bowed and hands folded in a devotional attitude." end quote. And she says he has a jerking shuffling walk.

She concluded that although he was unaware of what he was doing, quote, "We can scarcely avoid the conclusion that it is a fragment of a religious ritual." end quote. She said it was suggestive of a May Day march or a Mummers Parade. She described a Black female patient similarly detached from reality who, quote, "Bends slightly backward with chest elevated and assumes a facial expression intended to be terrifying." end quote.

The woman, she said, spits, snorts, stamps her feet, waves her skirt all the while producing what [? Everts ?] described as terrifying grimaces. This, she concluded, using Fraser as a guide, was also a phylogenetic parallel of ancient rituals and ceremonies, in this case, she said among savages meant to scare away demons.

But where she saw the white man's manifestation of this ritual as fragmentary, incomplete, suggestive of ancient rituals, she insisted that the Black woman's expression was much more recognizable and complete because in her words, quote, "The colored race is so much nearer its stage of barbarism." end quote.

And she mobilized, she asserted the provenance of quote, "Hoodoos, conjures, and spells." end quote, in Black culture established that insanity among African-Americans was both the product-- was the product both of these ancient inheritances and in her view, this kind of proximity of what she said the primitive method of thought that was an integral part of the race.

And it was her reading of Frazer on talismans, spells, contagious magic, and sorcery that confirmed this assessment. Her footnotes are just full of references to this. Most white psychiatrists who published articles and delivered addresses about Black people and mental illness in this period were associated with one of the many state hospitals for the insane primarily in the south in the late 19th century but representing a broader geography into the 20th century.

The frameworks they developed, offering medical evidence for the purported connection between insanity and what they imagined as African savagery, Black people's unfitness for civilization and freedom, propensity for superstitious belief and overly emotional religious practice, this framework became authoritative and influential well into the 20th century, maybe even now.

There were few Black physicians specializing in psychiatry in this early period to weigh in on these issues. Constantine Clinton Barnett who was a graduate of Howard University Medical School, and the son of a prominent Baptist pastor in Huntington, West Virginia and a first cousin of historian Carter G. Woodson was unusual in that he had charge of a state mental institution.

In 1926, Barnett became the first superintendent of West Virginia's Lincoln State Hospital for the Colored Insane, and his wife Clara Mathews Barnett, a nurse, became the hospital's matron. And they had run a cottage hospital prior to this. Barnett believed that the study of, in his words, religion, mythology, magic, and sociology, that this was vital for psychiatrists.

And in some ways, his views on the relationship of religion to the manifestation of mental illness among his patients bore some relation to theories put forth by white psychiatrists in the decades before he began his work. But Barnett argued for consideration of culture rather than racial traits, albeit in the context of an implicit cultural and religious hierarchy.

He would be joined in the 1930s by several psychiatrists at the Tuskegee Veterans Hospital, most notably, Georgia Moore, George S. Moore, the son of a congregationalist minister and it's very striking to me that this set of these very first Black psychiatrists are sons of clergy.

They would contribute to a shift in the field from arguments about race and religion as setting the terms for the development of mental illness to questions about environment and discrimination, and I see them as kind of heralding a broader change that comes about certainly by the 1940s in American psychiatry.

So my larger project examines the stakes of psychiatric interpretations of Black religious life from the late 19th century through the mid 20th century with several significant changes in the later period, which I'm happy to mention, with the aim of offering a broad analysis of the significance of religion and race to early American psychiatry and of psychiatry's role in defining the bounds of religion in American culture and shaping the possibilities of Black freedom in slavery's wake.

And so I'm eager to learn from the expertise and wisdom here, to consider the afterlives of the racialization of religious excitement. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

AHMAD GREENE-HAYES: So thank you so much, Dr. Weisenfeld, for that really enlightening lecture. We have lots of time for Q&A. And so I imagine that there are questions for Dr. Weisenfeld. As you all think about those questions, I guess I will offer one question, I think, that's looming on the project.

I couldn't help but think about images of African-Americans who have been institutionalized, who come out of religious communities. So I'm thinking of, of course, Malcolm X's mother who, you know, faces immense state pressure, you know--

JUDITH WEISENFELD: Elijah Muhammad.

AHMAD GREENE-HAYES: --Elijah Muhammad's family also, thinking about James Baldwin's father or stepfather. Pauli Murray. Yeah, like the list is quite extensive. And in some ways, I wonder if you have an account about how the field of African-American religious history engages with these figures.

In some ways, they are always on the periphery of concern, but they're so central to the biographical accounts, right, of these figures, James Baldwin in particular writes about that kind of patriarchal relationship and its impact on his identity. But I'm curious about how, you know, an analysis of mental illness like reconfigures how we even interpret someone like Baldwin.

So I'm just curious if you could comment about that and then if any other questions emerge, we'll go from there. And we have two wonderful graduate assistants. We have Amin on this side and Destiny on that side who have microphones. And thank you both for all of your help today. And so-- and also [? Susu ?] in the back. I meant to shout [? Susu ?] out who has been amazing for all of the planning.

[APPLAUSE]

The three of them have just been incredible so thank you so much.

JUDITH WEISENFELD: Yeah, that's a wonderful question. I actually found-- so Jacob Lawrence is another figure who willingly entered a hospital. I found his grandfather in an archive also committed to a state mental hospital for religious excitement, which, yeah, is fascinating.

So the intergenerational question is really profound. I think-- I came to this project from the last one, because I was reading about the published psychiatric studies from the 1930s about followers of Father Divine and the was this little-- this kind of cottage industry among Bellevue Hospital psychiatrists who write these studies.

And so I started thinking about the broader question of in that project of what did it mean for a kind of-- a multi-layered pathologizing of people who are in these new religious movements cult does some of that work right then sending them for psychiatric evaluation.

And in doing that project, I read that Elijah Muhammad was diagnosed with dementia praecox when he was imprisoned for draft evasion. I mean, I think just-- the thing I've come out of all of this is that thinking about is how important it is to really understand the cultural meaning of that at that time for these different figures that--

And it's a balance that I'm not sure I strike well, although I said something about it is that these are mechanisms of constraint and containment, and that is the case for early Pentecostalism, for the nation of Islam, for Father Divine's movement, and yet there are also cases where people are in distress and need care.

There are cases where it may be containment, but it's a containment that's happening through a frame that may not be exactly the same at every given time. And so it has been very daunting for me. I'm a scholar of religion. I'm not a historian of medicine or anything to kind of figure out what all of this is. Thank you, Martin Summers, for your work.

And I think it matters to be really careful about that. I mean, again, we see this with Dr. Huck's work that the in-depth explication of the mechanisms of white supremacy is important and so that's another way that I think it's just easy to gloss and say, oh, Malcolm X's mother was institutionalized.

I've said that, you know, a million times, but I don't know-- now I think, well, what exactly was happening? And when I went back and I read Elijah Muhammad's FBI file, and there is a piece of the hospital record in there, it's very complicated and really textured and tells me something more than I had thought about before. I don't know if that's a great--

AUDIENCE: Thank you, Judith, for such a wonderful talk. The entire time you were providing your lecture, I was thinking about the social sciences, and the racism embedded in the founding of the social sciences. And, you know, I think about anthropology, the work Lee Baker has done to kind of excavate that history, sociology, the work Alvin Morris has done talking Du Bois and sociology.

And so I was curious about psychiatry, and you mentioned 1940 as maybe the start of a turning point. I wanted to know if you would elaborate a bit on that history in psychiatry because even in anthropology, you know, Du Bois-- Boas is ostracized, because he's challenging the ways in which race is seen as kind of biological in anthropology.

Later on, Herskovits as well in some ways. And so I'm just curious what that battle looks like in psychiatry and how long it took and who was involved if you know any of that history.

JUDITH WEISENFELD: I-- that's a great question. I-- the way I write about that, I foreground E. Franklin Frazier and-- name's escaping me right now-- in conversation with people like George S. Moore. Who's another? Oh, actually, Horace Mann Bond would be another key figure.

So those two social scientists are writing in the 1930s, late '20s and '30s as this set of psychiatrists at Tuskegee Veterans Hospital begin to do this shift. And I see Bond as really important, actually, in arguing. I mean, he's got a piece where he does like a cutting analysis of all of this white psychiatric theory.

And he's like none of the-- these statistics from these hospitals that are just gussied up jails, they tell us nothing, and we need to go and think really differently. So I want to locate those-- so people like Bond and Frazier and this early group of psychiatrists as starting this in the 1930s.

So I kind of put it back a little bit earlier than maybe some of the material I've read. They're-- the psychiatrists are trained by-- or they're kind of supported by-- his name, too, is going to escape me, oh, Solomon Carter Fuller who's the first Black psychiatrist.

And he is the son of medical missionaries who went to Liberia, and so he also has a church background, and he supports them. So it's kind of early period. And then really through World War-- World War II changes American psychiatry a lot and people begin to think more about context and trauma and in ways that start to reshape the field.

But some of the early-- the people who are doing that work are reading Boas, right. So anthropologists are actually really important to that turn as well. So even though-- as I was working on the 19th century, I was always saying, I'm only working on these kind of MDs in these hospitals, but as I went over a longer period, I realized how important some of the Black social scientists were to the turn and how important the marginalized anthropologists were to how psychiatry was starting to change.

I see Dr. Summers nodding so maybe that's OK. I mean, the other thing that happens too is that Black-- this is kind of where I end one of the places I go in the book is that in Black communities, they start to look for other ways to provide care so turn to the mental hygiene movement and community mental health clinics, things like that.

And so they start to embrace social work even more. So I do see, kind of, social science and social work as really important for supporting the work that some of the Black psychiatrists want to do. Got two questions there.

AUDIENCE: Thank you so much. It's such a brilliant way of reframing the production of psychiatric knowledge, and to be really kind of situated within the religious thought of these psychiatrists, and I'm really looking forward to reading your work. I wanted to ask, you briefly alluded to it that the theme of the talk is the racialization of religious excitement, and you briefly alluded to kind of the gendering of religious excitement.

So-- because, you know, a lot of the people who you pointed to-- now I'm blanking on their names-- [? Everts, ?] Malloy, right? Yeah.

JUDITH WEISENFELD: O'Malley.

AUDIENCE: O'Malley. Yeah, sorry. They're working with primarily female patients, right, and Linde is working with male patients. But one of the slides that you showed is kind of the disproportionate diagnosis of religious excitement in central state hospital.

And I'm just wondering whether or not you're able to determine if, like, more women are being diagnosed as suffering from the exciting causes being religious excitement or men or just that. If you could talk a little bit about that, if you're seeing that in the archives.

JUDITH WEISENFELD: Yeah, that's a great question. Actually going in-- I mean, being pulled into this or following the questions I had, I thought that this was going to be a project that is going to be more about Black women as-- certainly as the majority of certain kind of formal religious contexts, but also I thought I would see ideas of like hysteria or nervousness more prominently featured, and I did not find that.

And then in terms of numbers, I think I cut the footnote out, there are more men in these institutions than women who are-- for whom religious excitement is attached to them as a cause, and I think there are a couple of reasons. I think the main reason is just that there are more-- I think there are more-- just more men in these institutions.

And men are more likely, perhaps, to be institutionalized, less likely to be kind of paroled out, for example. But there is also a way that this frame of excessive emotionalism that's a kind of-- I see as a subcategory of religious excitement serves as a way of like feminizing the race and yeah.

So I mean, I think the dominant mode or way that emotion and superstition get framed is in relation to the idea of a child like race, right, so in the, right, the idea of developmental stages of human development and racial development. But I do think that it does also work to kind of feminize.

But I have statistics for several of these hospitals, and it's not a huge disproportion. It might be like high 50% men with religious excitement. And I saw it in all of the hospitals I looked at.

AUDIENCE: Hi. My name is Henry Love. I'm a developmental psychologist, and I work for an organization called Win, and we're the largest homelessness provider in the country, and one of the biggest issues that we're dealing with right now is with street homelessness and for a lot of us in the field of homelessness and homelessness response, we contribute a lot of it to the shutting down of those psychiatric hospitals in the '60s and the '70s.

So my question is, you know, when we see what's happening with Jordan Neely and just even what's happening today because a lot of those psychiatric facilities that have been shut down, we're opening them up again and ironically enough, they're being filled with Black men, mostly migrants.

And so there's this interesting sort of through line in history, and I'm curious to know sort of like from that end off point in the '40s, like so what sort of-- as we go from the '40s into the '60s, '70s and these facilities close down, what is that, sort of, legacy of religious excitement look like throughout that period, and then how do you see that through line into the present?

JUDITH WEISENFELD: My book ends in 1950 something.

[LAUGHTER]

I-- so I'll just say two things. I'll say three things. One, I can't give you a clear account, because I didn't do that work. I end the book with the story of a man named George Bennett, whose life covers the whole period of the project and extends me into the '70s.

He was born in North Carolina and joined-- and I won't go into the details-- but he really tracks so many of the developments in this period, but he ends up arrested for burglary. He's in Harlem, and he's sent to Sing Sing. And he serves a long sentence there, but he has a religious experience while he's in prison, and he is sent to a mental hospital.

And he's actually very happy to be there, because he's got this religious work he's writing, and he feels less surveilled there. He says they already think I'm crazy here, so I'm not being-- they just let me write this thing. And some of it is this really-- it's a kind of religious critique of psychiatry, and he uses the diagnostic terms very specifically.

He gets out and returns to Harlem, and he's actually not an unknown figure. His whole archive is at the Schomburg. He has a kind of self published autobiography. He is on the radio. And he's got some ads in the newspaper in a way that made me really think differently about the community reception of somebody like him-- was not a great answer to you.

But it made me-- so he's out before deinstitutionalization is really ramping up, but I think it gives me a hint maybe of some other ways of thinking about how people who had been framed in this way might have functioned in their communities in the later period. That's not a great answer.

The other through line that I was interested in that it turns out my now colleague, your former colleague Aisha Beliso-De Jesús is answering for me is about the rise, and Terrence Kiel is working on this as well, the rise of excited delirium as an afterlife of this that has a direct impact on the violence that is police violence and-- against Black men and men of color and many contexts, right.

So she-- I mean, she has a book coming out very soon that traces the origin of that police diagnosis to a medical examiner's pathologizing of Afro-Carribean religions. And so there is-- it was formed in the same way that these ideas about religious excitement kind of infuse this early psychiatric theory about race.

And so I think it was easy for me to think about excited delirium as maybe just kind of holding the ideas about excessive, you know, bodies as necessarily excessive in certain ways, right. That is a kind of secularized narrative, but she has shown me that it is-- you know, that the religious component of that really persists.

And we just-- I mean, just read this book. It's going to be great.

AUDIENCE: Hi. First, I just want to say thank you for your work, just really grateful, and it really is the bedrock of many conversations and things that we're holding in the healing justice work that I do, and we do. I'm really curious, given the current moment and some of the conversations that are happening in psychiatry and psychology, particularly like the decades long quest to essentially find medical genetic data that validates the diagnostic criteria as it's been conjured or created.

I'm really curious about what your research and experience is giving you in terms of insight to see what metrics were used, how those diagnostic criteria were developed and either lack of metrics given that conversation that's really kind of been happening a lot in healing justice and dominant spaces.

JUDITH WEISENFELD: One of the things that has struck me so powerfully is just how much context shapes the production of these frames. And I was just curious about some of these doctors, and I started looking into their histories and found, oh, this one who's publishing in the American Journal of Insanity saying slavery was the most beneficial environment institution for moral and mental health of Black people.

Has father had, you know, enslaved 300 people. Like these kinds of-- it's not-- I mean, it's hard to say this because of this but once-- in the aggregate, once I kept finding, oh, these are people who are beneficiaries of this institution, invested in all of the assumptions that support the practice of slavery and they're also-- they see themselves as a certain kind of Protestant caretaker of social systems.

And I think system is really important that there's kind of a way that they are taking responsibility that once I put all of those things together, and then next to this theory, it just-- it really changed how I thought about it and it just makes me approach any kind of contemporary, I don't know, brain imaging or whatever.

Like there-- we know a lot about-- now people are talking about the assumptions behind AI. What's behind-- what is back there that is shaping the tools, and then the interpretation of the data and all of that? And I don't have any experience or expertise to do that.

But I just-- I think having my self diagnose this world of discourse from the late 19th century and early 20th century and thinking about what religious assumptions, what racial assumptions, what social assumptions have shaped that, lead me to ask people to ask-- who know to ask those same questions about what are the new diagnostic categories, and where did those come from.

And to not just-- our colleague in the field of religious studies, John Lardas Modern, has a recent book called Neuromantic that traces the history of the brain and religion, and the religion in brain studies and really to not concede that such a X thing is secular and scientific is what I've learned from this. Religion is-- it's there.

AUDIENCE: Thank you, Judith. And welcome. Always a pleasure to see you, to be in your presence. I have three quick questions. The first one is, particularly the cases in the early 20th century, do you think that some of this is, in psychiatry, is in some ways a kind of anti-Pentecostal rise?

Where in Azusa Street, the sense when you really can speak to the spirit, and this really is happening and wondering how much of that discourse is in line with this kind of anti-Pentecostal rise. So one question. The other one it was-- on NPR, there was a new book that had come out about a particular mental hospital right outside of Baltimore-- yes. Yes.

And that sense that it was really understood that mental-- this mental illness was because African people had been emancipated, and instead of finding a lot of records that had to do with talk therapy or any kind of therapeutic, they found that you put them to work, and so they had them building extensive buildings throughout Maryland.

And that was the therapy. If you put Black people back to work where they rightfully belong, then they will come back to their right minds. And the third piece is as you were describing I think it was O'Malley's of the woman and what she was doing in her face.

I'm thinking, well, if you had gone to any kind of African diaspora ceremony, and you see the moment of trans possession, that's exactly what it's looking like or if you've seen-- many people have seen Maya Deren's work in Haiti in that moment of trans possession and wondering if some of that is going on.

In those moments of ritual, they are only temporary states, because you have initiated priests and ritual specialists in order to pull you out of that. And I'm wondering, what does it mean when that may possibly be happening in a context where you don't have the kind of ritual fortification and specialists to move you in and out of those trans possessive states.

JUDITH WEISENFELD: Those are three great questions. On the last-- I'll connect the last two labor as treatment is part of all of these institutions, especially in the late 19th century into the early 20th century. And these places like you can see if you-- oh, it's not on anymore.

The South Carolina State Hospital's slide I had up. These are huge complexes with farms and laundries and shoe shops, and so they're doing industry-- they get an appropriation from the state, but they're also producing to support the institution and also to potentially make money.

And so the annual reports are mostly financial reports, and-- but there is the idea certainly that labor-- right, so lunacy is an inability to manage your civil affairs in a way, right. So how do you get out it's partly that you can prove that you can do this.

But the-- William Drury who was a longtime superintendent of Central Hospital in Virginia, there's a hearing-- a congressional hearing about Saint Elizabeth's, and he comes to testify. All these hospital superintendents are testifying about how they run their institutions.

And he-- in this testimony, he says, yes, we put our patients to work, and I chose not to have updated laundry equipment, because the equipment we have, it takes the women longer, and they have to work harder, and they're used to it. And I mean, he says this before Congress.

And Mab Segrest who's written about the Georgia asylum talks about the differential labor and this I think was also the case in Saint Elizabeth's. You see Black women in the laundry, white women might be in the sewing shop, Black men are doing hard labor, white men are fixing shoes.

So it-- Segrest calls it the plantation asylum complex. So that-- and religion is part of a kind of disciplining work within the asylum. So Drury again, talks about how he relies-- he's relying-- sometimes there are chaplains, but he's relying on some local Black ministers.

But he's kind of monitoring that they are providing services that are not emotional, and so people are kind of disciplining themselves into this, and I have several cases where the patients are saying-- you can see them disciplining themselves to try and get out. Like, I'll show you I can behave. I'll go to chapel and do this sort of thing.

On the Pentecostalism question, yes, and it's definitely an anti-Pentecostal-- holiness Pentecostal sensibility over the course of the late 19th into the early 20th century. And I went back to some of the early periodicals, apostolic truths, right, from Azusa Street to see if they had anything to say about mental illness, and they-- and they do.

And which I-- I just wasn't looking for it before. They are aware-- and Heather Curtis has written this about holiness people. They're aware that they're being framed as crazy, but they-- the paper is just full of these articles about we're not insane. We have the cure, and it's the Holy Spirit.

And there's all these dramatic stories of-- actually of people who have been declared to be insane, committed to the asylum and then at some dramatic moment or another, just about to be taken off, the Holy Spirit descends and proves, you know. So they're in this whole-- they're using this discourse and telling these stories to reframe how they're being described, and again, we have the cure. There's not the cause of mental illness.

AUDIENCE: Thank you so much for your talk. I am in a department surrounded by historians, so I'm constantly amazed at how people go into archives and come out with great grand theories that make sense. So thank you so much for, you know, the of data you're combing through.

My question kind of goes back to a comment you had at the very beginning of your lecture, and it's more about your work than the content of what you're saying, and as you're talking about it, I feel so much violence, like there's this violence against Black religiosity, it's violence against Blackness, it's violence against Black freedom, right.

And how do you as, you know, a scholar who's been working on this for years, how do you-- how do you get through these kinds of materials that are harsh and that not only are they harsh, but it's not you can say it's completely passed either.

JUDITH WEISENFELD: Yeah, thank you for that question. It's-- I've never been in-- I've never-- I can't wait to finish this, because I can't wait to stop being in it all the time. And I've never had a project like that. I mean, I have been-- I have learned so much about the world, and the past in this project, but it's really-- I've reached the point where it's weighing on me now.

I don't know. There are stages of it. And the research was just like, oh, I'm finding-- I'm piecing together this whole story and look at this. But when I was in the South Carolina state archives that have the commitment papers, they have just-- there's a ton of records there and medical files that are not as detailed as I would have liked.

But I just-- I don't know. I was opening up these-- their commitment paperworks or these long kind of tri-folded things, and I was just pulling it out, pulling out the envelope, opening it up and looking for these stories, and-- that many of which are of violence.

And I don't know. I was just-- in that trip, I got into this mode of just feeling like I was doing-- I was doing something for these people by touching these papers and opening them, and-- it felt like nobody had opened many of these envelopes in a long time. And so I felt of a kind of witnessing. We've talked about this actually in a session at the AR.

I will say I wrote-- I wrote the introduction last and I wrote it based on, actually, a conference response I had done about James Baldwin's story Death of the Prophet which is where he writes about his father's death, his stepfather institutionalized for religious excitement at probably Pilgrim-- I think Pilgrim State Hospital in Long Island.

And, you know, I wrote it and had, you know-- it was OK. And I got to the end of writing it, and I thought, like, this is actually-- this is the wrong way to start this book because it doesn't-- ot doesn't do justice to the people I've found or doesn't talk-- engage this question of what it felt like to do this research.

And I keep pointing at you Dr. Summers but it was a file I went to find at the National Archives in the summer. It was my last trip, and it was one of the last files I found and it was a file in your footnotes. You had connected it to the R. [? Everts ?] article.

And I found this and there was a photograph in there, and it's a photograph of a woman who was quite elderly, who was in there because they keep saying she's catching witches, she's catching witches. And the photograph, you see her-- there are a lot of photographs in here like this, but this one really stuck with me.

It's a-- like it's a mugshot and there's white man's hand on her head. And I just-- you know, when I saw this in the archive, I was just really kind of overcome, and when I decided to get rid of that really, you know, felt kind of heartless introduction I had drafted, I went back to her, and I wrote about her.

And so I've kind of come to-- and book ending, I've found that George Bennett such a fascinating character and to kind of try really hard to invest this terrible story with people who I can foreground in some way. It's hard throughout. But anyway, I just-- I really-- I ditched that, and I thought I had to start with something about how it felt for me to work with the material.

SPEAKER: And we have one final question.

AUDIENCE: I feel a lot of pressure now with this question. So I'm Charmaine Jackman. I'm the founder of Inner Psych, and I'm a psychologist by training, and we do a lot of work around destigmatizing mental health. And you know, your research is so important because it helps us understand why today there's stigma, why we hear these stories about-- these fears about hospitalization.

When I've worked with young people and families, meeting with a psychologist or a therapist, their immediate concern is you're going to hospitalize me, right. So this narrative has come through the generations. I was curious how the Black psychologists were received as they were countering what was known or what was thought as fact.

And I'm curious, you know, psychology has done some work. You know, there's still a lot of work to do around apologizing for the racist ideas that they have perpetuated in the field. And I'm curious if you know what work psychiatry is doing around that as well.

JUDITH WEISENFELD: Yeah, I think the American Psychiatric Association, not that long ago, made a public apology about some of these same issues, and they're trying to foreground some of the early Black psychiatrists. But there's probably-- I'm certain there's more to do, but they're kind of in that mode of-- it happened around the time we were all in the racial reckoning.

One of the outcomes of that racial reckoning is-- I think, actually, is that archives have restricted them access more since that. Mab Segrets book, Administrations of Lunacy about the Georgia-- the hospital race in the Georgia, hospital in Milledgeville. I read that during the pandemic. That was going to be my next stop archivally.

And when I wrote to the archivist, she said our attorneys have advised us to close these files. So, you know, I feel I got in there under the gun. There are several great histories of institutions, but-- so yeah, I think there's a lot to be done, but the constraints have become more serious, I think, more daunting.

Your first question was about the Black psychiatrist. I felt like in the period I was looking at, they were working in a different world than the white psychiatrist in some ways in the earliest period when like the '30s-- when they start to come out. They're publishing in the Journal of the National Medical Association which is the Black Medical Association in the Journal of Negro Education.

So I mean, they're talking to African-Americans and George Moore, I think it is, is trying to promote psychotherapy. But it's not really-- yeah. But then later, there are-- I'll say it's like after my book ends. But in that period, I don't-- they are dismantling the psychiatric theory that has been built up, but they're not--

I'm not sure who's-- at a certain point, occasionally, I see them footnoted in some of the literature from the '40s. So they're being read, but I'm not sure if they interact at all with the white psychiatric world. That's a good question. Thanks.

GEORGE AUMOITHE: I just want to encourage everyone to come by to the games room tomorrow. We will be having a continental breakfast at 9:30 AM. Our first panel will begin at 10:30 AM with historians and religion scholars, Reverend Dr. Monica A. Coleman, Dr. Martin Summers, Dr. Stephanie Y. Evans, chaired by our very own Dr. Tracy Hucks.

We'll be opening with the first plenary followed by, at 1:15 PM, panel two with health practitioners, neuroscientists, psychologists, and policymakers, Silvana Brown, Dr. Henry Love, Dr. Joshua Lewis Gills, and Yolo Akili Robinson, chaired by Dr. Melissa Wood Bartholomew.

And we hope that you'll also be able to join us at 3:00 PM for a very special closing community keynote conversation with our Charmaine Jackman. With that note, I hope everyone has a good evening. We're going to feed our speakers to now. [LAUGHS]

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