Book ID: CBB188429093

What's Wrong with the Poor?: Psychiatry, Race, and the War on Poverty (2016)

unapi

Raz, Mical (Author)


The University of North Carolina Press


Publication Date: 2016
Physical Details: 264 pages
Language: English

In the 1960s, policymakers and mental health experts joined forces to participate in President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. In her insightful interdisciplinary history, physician and historian Mical Raz examines the interplay between psychiatric theory and social policy throughout that decade, ending with President Richard Nixon's 1971 veto of a bill that would have provided universal day care. She shows that this cooperation between mental health professionals and policymakers was based on an understanding of what poor men, women, and children lacked. This perception was rooted in psychiatric theories of deprivation focused on two overlapping sections of American society: the poor had less, and African Americans, disproportionately represented among America's poor, were seen as having practically nothing. Raz analyzes the political and cultural context that led child mental health experts, educators, and policymakers to embrace this deprivation-based theory and its translation into liberal social policy. Deprivation theory, she shows, continues to haunt social policy today, profoundly shaping how both health professionals and educators view children from low-income and culturally and linguistically diverse homes.

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Reviewed By

Review Deanne M. Gillespie (2015) Review of "What's Wrong with the Poor?: Psychiatry, Race, and the War on Poverty". Journal of Southern History (pp. 523-524). unapi

Review Wendy Gonaver (2017) Review of "What's Wrong with the Poor?: Psychiatry, Race, and the War on Poverty". Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (pp. 508-513). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB188429093/

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Authors & Contributors
Summers, Martin
Grossi, Élodie
Mendes, Gabriel N.
Strings, Sabrina
Evans, Jazmin Antwynette
Kimani S. K. Nehusi
Concepts
Medicine and race
Science and race
Psychiatry
African Americans
African Americans and science
Poverty
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
21st century
20th century, early
18th century
Places
United States
Libya
Southern states (U.S.)
Georgia (U.S.)
New York City (New York, U.S.)
East Africa
Institutions
Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic
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