Controllin the Planet Author(S): Jonathan Metzl Source: Transition, No

W.E.B. Du Bois Institute

Controllin the Planet Author(s): Jonathan Metzl Source: Transition, No. 115, Mad (2014), pp. 23-33 Published by: Indiana University Press on behalf of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/transition.115.23 . Accessed: 24/09/2014 12:10

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Indiana University Press and W.E.B. Du Bois Institute are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Transition.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 140.247.162.176 on Wed, 24 Sep 2014 12:10:35 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Controllin the Planet

a brief history of schizophrenia

Jonathan Metzl

An epidemic of schizophrenia afflicted rap artists in the 1990s and 2000s. At least, that’s how it seemed. In record numbers, rappers from across the East-West divide suddenly claimed to be schizophrenic. For instance, in 1995, Natural Born Killaz (a Dr. Dre and Ice Cube col- laboration) rapped about their insanity. “Journey with me into the mind of a maniac,” Dr. Dre rhymed, “doomed to be a killer . . . with a heart full of terror.” “I’m the unforgiving, psycho-driven murderer / It’s authentic,” Ice Cube replied, “goddamn it, schizophrenic.” Not to be outdone, longtime Brentwood hip hop artists EPMD, rapping with LL Cool J, boasted that they smoked M.C.s because their rhyme style was “deadly psy- Rap lyrics are the latest chopath schizophrenic.” Meanwhile, Bizzy installments in a political Bone’s call to arms, “Thugz Cry,” intoned debate that has evolved that “we represent the planet, get schizophrenic and panic.” over the past century In psychiatric circles, schizophrenia is (at least) regarding the considered a serious mental illness that causes delusions, hallucinations, and so- contested relationships cial withdrawal. But in rap, schizophrenia between race, madness, means something else: a mode of defiance, violence, and civil rights. a boast, or a threat. The term appears frequently when describing competition between rappers. In “Speak Ya Clout,” the duo Gang Starr rhymes that they are “schizophrenic with rhyme plus we’re well organized” as a way of warning that they are “stepping rugged and tough.” Schizophrenia also enhances claims of com- petitive violence—in “16 on Death Row,” 2Pac famously warned that, “I’m kind of schizophrenic, I’m in this shit to win it.” Schizophrenia also helps rappers describe collective responses to racism or injustice. In the multi-artist hit “Everything,” Busta Rhymes calls for action by rapping, “Panic and schizophrenic, sylvy-Atlantic / Wrap up your face in ceramic, goddamit we controllin the planet.” How did a psychiatric term develop rap valence? Of course, such transformations occur often in rap, a musical form whose lyrics frequently derive power by coopting, decontextualizing, and redefining

Metzl • Controllin the Planet 23

This content downloaded from 140.247.162.176 on Wed, 24 Sep 2014 12:10:35 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Turn of heretofore mainstream words with altogether different, and frequently Endearment. more critical, meanings. Yet something much larger than mere sam- Oil Painting. 60 × 36 in. Cour- pling is at play in rap’s use of the terms schizophrenia and schizo- tesy of the artist phrenic. Rap lyrics are the latest installments in a political debate that and EbonNia has evolved over the past century (at least) regarding the contested Gallery, Dayton, relationships between race, madness, violence, and civil rights. This Ohio. ©2012 James Pate. debate put psychiatrists into unknowing conversation with liberation theorists, Black Power activists, and protest musicians. At stake is a se- ries of existential and material questions about the causes, actions, and implications of sanity itself.

His behavior tends to be consistent with his delusions

Early psychiatric notions of schizophrenia connoted the polar oppo- site of Ice Cube’s description of “unforgiving psycho-driven murders.” Coined by Swiss psychiatrist Paul Eugen Bleuler in 1911, “schizophrenia” initially implied an illness in which patients turned away from reality into a world of fantasy, wishes, and symbols. As an early proponent of Freud, Bleuler placed the illness on a spectrum with neurosis as a developmental disorder caused by a “splitting” of the basic functions of the personality. He thus combined the Greek words for split (schizein) and mind (phre¯n). “I call [the illness] ‘schizophrenia,’ ” he explained, “because the ‘splitting’ of the different psychic functions is one of its most important characteristics.”

24 Transition 115

This content downloaded from 140.247.162.176 on Wed, 24 Sep 2014 12:10:35 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Bleuler believed that emotional splitting was accompanied, not by violence, but by symptoms such as indifference, docility, creativity, and passion. “Even in the less severe forms of illness,” he wrote, “indifference seems to be the external sign . . . to friends and relations, to va- cation or enjoyment, to duties or rights, to good fortune or bad . . . [A] mother might American doctors and show right at the beginning of her illness laypersons linked the that she is indifferent to the weal and woes new notion of the “split of her children.” When the Swiss psychiatrist’s defini- mind” with docile white tion of illness crossed the Atlantic in the bodies. Psychiatrists 1920s–1950s, American doctors and laypersons linked the new notion of the “split described patients mind” with docile white bodies. Psychia- with schizophrenia as trists described patients with schizophrenia white academics, poets, as white academics, poets, eccentrics, and women. For instance, in his 1927 Textbook eccentrics, and women. of Psychiatry, psychiatrist Arthur P. Noyes argued that persons prone to schizophrenia included “sensitive” persons who maintained “child-like facial expressions far past the usual age—an expression of vagueness and dreaminess.” Such a patient was

quiet, serious, shy, easily embarrassed and without sense of humor. In school or college he never takes part in rough games . . . [H]e has a genuine love of nature and is often found alone in the woods and fields; he may be extravagantly enraptured by a beautiful sunset.

Similar assumptions played out in American diagnostic manuals. When schizophrenia first appeared in the 1918 edition of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene’s Statistical Manual for the Use of Institu- tions for the Insane, the text explained that “the illness afflicts the seclu- sive type of personality.” And in 1952, the first edition of theDiagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), psychiatry’s diagnostic bible, defined schizophrenia as a psychological reaction characterized by “emotional disharmony, unpredictable disturbances in stream of thought,” and “regressive behavior.” Given this flowery framework, it is not surprising that many Ameri- cans believed that persons with schizophrenia—and particularly white persons with schizophrenia—were neither to be feared nor avoided. Schizophrenia often appeared in popular magazines and newspapers in the 1920s–1950s as a personality disorder brought on by the pressures

Metzl • Controllin the Planet 25

This content downloaded from 140.247.162.176 on Wed, 24 Sep 2014 12:10:35 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions of white civilization. In 1936, the New York Times described schizophrenia as a disorder of “dual personality” found in men of luminosity. Arti- cles explained how brilliant white poets and novelists were touched by what they called “grandiloquence,” a propensity toward flowery prose 1950s’ advertisements believed to be one of the “telltale phrases of schizophrenia, the mild form of insanity for anti-schizophrenia known as split personality.” medications touted the Other articles described white, middle class women driven to insanity by the dual ways in which treatments pressures of housework and motherhood. rendered white women In the 1940s, periodicals such as Ladies’ “clean, cooperative, Home Journal and Better Homes and Gardens wrote of unhappily married, middle class and communicative.” white women whose schizophrenic mood swings were suggestive of “Doctor Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde,” a theme that also suffused Olivia de Havilland’s infamous depiction, in the 1948 film The Snake Pit, of a “schizophrenic housewife” named Virginia Stuart Cunningham. Meanwhile, 1950s-era advertisements for anti-schizophrenia medications touted the ways in which treatments rendered white women “clean, cooperative, and communicative.” However, a radical shift happened in the 1960s. In 1968, in the midst of a political climate marked by profound protest and social unrest, psychiatry published the second edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. That text recast the paranoid subtype of schizophrenia as a disorder of masculinized belligerence.

295.3 Schizophrenia, paranoid type . . . The patient’s attitude is frequently hostile and aggressive, and his behavior tends to be consistent with his delusions . . . the patient manifests the mechanism of projection, which attributes to others characteristics he cannot accept in himself . . .

The drive for revision was almost certainly grounded in a desire for clinical accuracy, part of a larger shift from diagnosing mental illness based on “personalities” to immediately observable “actions.” However, it is critical to bear in mind that these revisions took place during the 1960s—a period of mass demonstrations against a host of political and racial evils. Therefore, one cannot ignore the impact, intentional or not, of the DSM’s authors’ decision to label as potentially pathologi- cal, delusional, or paranoid the rationale that hostile political actions are justifiable responses to the attitudes of others. And theDSM II

26 Transition 115

This content downloaded from 140.247.162.176 on Wed, 24 Sep 2014 12:10:35 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions brought about a radical shift in assumptions about the race, gender, and temperament of schizophrenia as a result. Growing numbers of psychiatrists asserted that schizophrenia was a condition that afflicted “Negro men,” and that black forms of the illness were more hostile and aggressive than were white ones. At the time, it likely appeared to many Americans that an epidemic of schizophrenia was spreading among angry black men. In fact, psychiatry’s frame shift produced new categories of schizophrenic illness. Researchers used DSM II criteria to uncover “hostile” aspects of black schizophrenia, such as paranoia, delusions, or rage, and to draw connections between schizophrenia and civil rights demonstrations. A number of studies conflated black schizophrenia with Black Power in order to illus- trate evolving understandings of the illness as hostile or violent, using long-standing stereotypes of manic, crazy black men to demonstrate “new” forms of schizophrenic illness. In 1968, psychiatrists Walter Bromberg and Frank Simon described schizophrenia as a “Protest Psychosis,” whereby black men developed “hostile and aggressive feelings” and “delusional anti-whiteness” after listening to the words of Malcolm X, joining the Black Muslims, or aligning with groups that preached militant resistance to white society. In that same year, psychiatric researchers Pierce and West argued that black men developed “delusions, grandi- osity, magical thinking, and . . . dangerous Growing numbers of aggressive feelings” when they participated psychiatrists asserted in civil rights sit-ins. that schizophrenia Mainstream newspapers in the 1960s and 1970s similarly described schizophre- was a condition that nia as a condition of angry black masculin- afflicted “Negro men,” ity, warning of schizophrenic black killers and that black forms of on the loose. “FBI Adds Negro Mental Pa- tient To ‘10 Most Wanted’ List,” warned a the illness were more Chicago Tribune headline in July 1966, above hostile and aggressive an article that advised readers to remain clear of “Leroy Ambrosia Frazier, an ex- than were white ones. tremely dangerous and mentally unbalanced schizophrenic escapee from a mental institution.” Hollywood films, such as Samuel Fuller’s 1963 B-movie classic, Shock Corridor, cast the illness as arising in black men who had participated in civil rights protests. Antipsychotic medication advertisements also shifted to show angry black men. An advertise- ment for the antipsychotic medication Haldol, which appeared in the May 1974 Archives of General Psychiatry, featured a cartoon of a distorted angry African American man shaking an inverted Black Power fist. The shifting frame surrounding schizophrenia had consequences in real-world clinical settings: starting in the late 1960s, schizophrenia

Metzl • Controllin the Planet 27

This content downloaded from 140.247.162.176 on Wed, 24 Sep 2014 12:10:35 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Haldol Ad- vertisement, Archives of Gen- eral Psychiatry, Volume 31, no. 5, 1974, p. 732.

became a diagnosis disproportionately applied to African American men. For instance, in the 1960s and 1970s, researchers “discovered” that African American men were “significantly more likely” than white men to receive schizophrenia diagnoses. And throughout the 1980s and 1990s, a host of articles from leading psychiatric and medical journals showed that doctors diagnosed the paranoid subtype of schizophrenia

28 Transition 115

This content downloaded from 140.247.162.176 on Wed, 24 Sep 2014 12:10:35 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions in African American men five to seven times more often than in white men.

Let us be maladjusted

A second historical trajectory important for understanding the schizophrenia of rap lies within the rhetoric of civil rights. Here, the split mind functioned, not as a mental illness, but as a protest identity—an internalized and then projected form of defiance. Martin Luther King, Jr. frequently used the examples of “schizophrenia” and “madness” to urge African Americans to psychologically “maladjust” themselves in the name of nonviolent protest. As he wrote in 1961,

It is no longer a choice between violence and non-violence. It is now either non-violence or non-existence . . . And so I call upon you to be maladjusted and continue in the maladjustment that you have already demonstrat- ed, for it may well be that the salvation of our world lies in the hands of the maladjusted. And so, let us be maladjusted.

Such language was not unusual for King, a rhetorician who often used psychological binaries to preach nonviolence. In his famous “Unful- filled Dreams” sermon, his soaring, elegant, final address at Ebenezer Baptist Church, King described the psychic split as follows.

It’s there: a tension at the heart of the universe between good and evil . . . And every time you set out to be good, there’s something pulling on you, telling you to be evil. There’s a civil war going on. There is a schizophrenia, as the psychologists or the psychiatrists would call it, going on within all of us . . .

King’s use of the term schizophrenia implied an ethical, spiritual divide that was, at once, universal to mankind and particular to the African American experience. In his formulation of civil rights, African Ameri- cans were always and already divided, their minds split both because of racism and segregation and because of the choices they faced in their attempts to change the system.

Metzl • Controllin the Planet 29

This content downloaded from 140.247.162.176 on Wed, 24 Sep 2014 12:10:35 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Meanwhile, in the rhetorical circles of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmi- chael, Robert F. Williams, and H. Rap Brown, schizophrenia was an ethical response to racism, a carnivalesque inversion which recognized “insanity” as the only sane response to the status quo. In this context, the language of paranoia, psychosis, and schizophrenia became a means of pathologizing white society while justifying aggressive self-defense. To be sure, schizophrenia was a complex term for Black Power, Black Nationalism, the Nation of Islam, and other groups advocating non-pas- sive resistance or armed self-defense. Many of these movements’ leaders had been spuriously diagnosed with the illness by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI ‘diagnosed’ Malcolm X with “pre-psychotic paranoid schizophrenia,” and with membership in the “Muslim Cult of Islam,” in the 1950s. In the early 1960s, the same agency diagnosed Robert Williams, the controversial head of the Monroe, North Carolina chapter of the NAACP, as schizophrenic, armed, and dangerous during his flight from trumped-up kidnapping charges. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that a number of activist leaders located insanity, not within the minds and bodies of persons who fought back against unjust social systems, but within racists who perpetuated them. In his influential text,Negroes With Guns, Williams argued that “we have come to comprehend the nature of racism. It is a mass psychosis.” Other voices argued that African American violence reflected the natural psychological consequences of violent American racism. The leading advocates of this position were the African American psychiatrists William Grier and Price Cobbs, whose Malcolm X-inspired 1968 book, Black Rage, became a national bestseller. In Black Rage, Grier and Cobbs depicted schizophrenia as a condition of “survival” for black Americans. Paranoid schizophrenia, they wrote, was a potentially violent state that emerged when black men were pushed into a split between adhering to the mores of white society and “fighting back” against them in order to stay alive. LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) famously likened “the whole situation of the Negro in America” to a form of playacting, in which activist intellectuals were forced into a split between a “Negro” self and an “American self.” In contradistinction to King, Jones articulated this split as necessary for social transformation: “To see this schizophrenia between being American and being alienated from America, well, that alienation has reached a point where a lot of people value it.” These and other thinkers seem to draw, not on psychiatry or med- icine, but on black philosophical and literary traditions, in defining schizophrenia as a condition forged in response to racism. For instance, Langston Hughes described a “Jim Crow shock” of black soldiers whose insanity resulted, not from battle fatigue, but from the internalized impact of American racism and segregation. And as is well known, W.E.B.

30 Transition 115

This content downloaded from 140.247.162.176 on Wed, 24 Sep 2014 12:10:35 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Du Bois described an African American “double consciousness,” a requisite “two-ness” of being “an American, a Negro; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” This notion of a structural, psy- chical split forged in adaptive response to Paranoid schizophrenia white society coursed through black polit- was a potentially violent ical thought for much of the next century. Double consciousness figured prominently state that emerged in the work of 1940s and 1950s intellectu- when black men were als, such as Richard Wright and Ralph Elli- pushed into a split son. Similar splits also appeared in debates about the psychological impact of racist between adhering to segregation beyond the United States. In the mores of white the colonial context, the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, whose ideas extensively influenced society and “fighting Black Power activists, defiantly described back” against them in an “internal divide” that resulted when “the order to stay alive. Negro” entered a white symbolic order. “The black man has two dimensions,” Fanon wrote in Black Skins, White Masks. “One is with his fellows, the other with the white man . . . That this self-division is a result of colonial subjugation is beyond question.”

Violence is not our pathology—it is a response to yours

One way to understand rap’s use of “schizophrenic” as an autobiograph- ical moniker is to see it as a reappropriation of psychiatric authority. You diagnosed us as aggressive, violent, and schizophrenic, rap lyrics contend, but we claim your racist diagnosis as our own. “Stepping rugged and tough,” your stigmatized disease is our threat; your assumptions about the pathology of black men who are “assaultive and belligerent” are reversed to become our mode of rebellion. Yet when read through black philosophical thought, rap’s invoca- tion of schizophrenia becomes more complicated than a mere reartic- ulation of Western medical terminology. Instead, the condition singer Mamie Smith described in 1920 as the “crazy blues”—in which going crazy functioned as a means to fight back against racial injustice—clearly predated the DSM by half a century, if not more. This lineage once al- lowed civil rights thinkers to signify the adaptive importance of, rather than the pathologization of, defiance to “Caucasian values.” And, it helps explain why schizophrenia became a potent metaphor in rap. History suggests, in other words, that when they call themselves schizophrenic, rappers call on traditions distinct from psychiatric ones. And as such, rap’s schizophrenia invokes more than mental illness; it also conveys a hidden critique of racist society, and promotes an

Metzl • Controllin the Planet 31

This content downloaded from 140.247.162.176 on Wed, 24 Sep 2014 12:10:35 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 3K. Charcoal. identity forged through time and experience and then worn as a mark 40 × 30 in. of strength and survival, rather than as a stigma. Courtesy of the Arthur Primas One can critique hip hop artists for perpetuating stigmatizing Collection and misperceptions about schizophrenia as an illness of uncontrollable ag- EbonNia Gallery, gression and hostility. In “Symptoms of Insanity,” onetime Psychopathic Dayton, Ohio. Records artist Esham warns that, because of symptoms of insanity, “I’m ©2012 James Pate. quick to pull the trigger . . . / A schizophrenic, so many panic.” Rap- ping with Esham, Dayton Family rapper Bootleg menacingly raps that his schizophrenia causes him to “sleep wit’ a glock.” Yet, such critiques risk simplifying the multiple meanings of schizophrenia in American culture. Popular American usage of these terms emerged from sever- al rhetorical traditions. Psychiatry was one locale, but so was African American philosophical thought. The former discourse took its cues from Bleuler and the DSM, and subsequently defined schizophrenia as an illness that resided in patients. But the latter took from Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Robert Williams, Fanon, and other theorists whose work helped code schizophrenia as a healthy adaptation to an insane, racist society. Martin Luther King used schizophrenia to urge nonviolent resistance. Amiri Baraka used the same term to encourage revolt. In both cases—and belying a historical reality often forgotten in our

32 Transition 115

This content downloaded from 140.247.162.176 on Wed, 24 Sep 2014 12:10:35 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions multicultural age—the goal was deeper than simply getting along. The goal was actual change. Remnants of this latter trajectory reverberate through rap, a musical form whose early innovators drew inspiration from the race politics of the 1960s and 1970s. Grandmaster Flash’s classic 1982 song, “The Message,” and 1980s Public Enemy albums By Any Means Necessary and It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back are but a few examples of rap’s initial political engagement—a mantle brilliantly picked up by, for instance, the searing critique in Ice Cube’s 2008 “Gangsta Rap Made Me Yes, we are black, male, Do It.” Intended or not, use of the terms and violent, present- schizophrenia and schizophrenic connect day rappers concur. 2Pac’s fight against the legal system and Bizzy Bone’s call for revolution to King, Du But this violence is not Bois, and also perhaps to Blues traditions our pathology—it is a that preserve a memory of a time when going crazy was a way of resisting the slave response to yours. master’s authority. Meanwhile, Rhymes, Bone, Thugs, and others turn Bromberg’s and Simon’s 1968 notion of a protest psychosis on its head. Yes, we are black, male, and violent, present-day rappers concur. But this violence is not our pathology—it is a response to yours. Put another way, rap’s use of the terms schizophrenia and schizophrenic connotes, not a disease, but an identity claimed in response to a system that misperceives survival strategies as insanity. Rap lyrics meanwhile remind us that diagnosis is an inherently political inter- action because diagnostic terminology is inherently politicized. Psy- chiatric definitions provide levels of clarity for patients and families struggling to understand painful life events. But wholesale acceptance of psychiatric terms and frameworks involves entry into a potentially racially subjugating symbolic order, in which biomedical definitions of illness supplant cultural or political ones. If rap lyrics are in any way reflective of larger wholes, then rap’s rhymes suggest that schizophrenia and schizophrenic remain contested terms within an ongoing clinical-cultural dialectic. On one hand, schizophrenia articulates the expert opinion of the doctor, whose trained knowledge is requisite for a correct diagnosis. On the other hand, schizophrenia signifies a rejection of medical authority by a power that is vested in the people. And Goddamit we controllin the planet.

Metzl • Controllin the Planet 33

This content downloaded from 140.247.162.176 on Wed, 24 Sep 2014 12:10:35 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions