This is a very good podcast from January of Brian Lehrer interviewing Dr. Jonathan Metzl, associate professor of psychiatry and women’s studies and director of the Culture, Health, and Medicine Program at University of Michigan. They talk about his new book, The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease which provides a cautionary tale of how anxieties about race continue to influence doctor-patient interactions.

I shy away from the whole topic of schizophrenia. I don’t know why, except that it has to do with all the noise and alarmist information on the disease, but also, to be blunt, how that noise has created a stigma about it in my own eyes.

In this cautionary tale, the cultural biases that not only invaded an individual therapist’s diagnosis, but also underpinned the “scientific” conventional wisdom of the mental health industry, was staggering. I wonder what biases exist, and we live with, today.

As a practicing psychiatrist, Metzl points out all the work he must do when a patient walks into his office to overcome the resistance or antagonism the patient may have with the field of psychiatry, and create for the patient an environment of trust and respect.