Book ID: CBB251110528

Under the Strain of Color: Harlem's Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry (2015)

unapi

In Under the Strain of Color, Gabriel N. Mendes recaptures the history of a largely forgotten New York City institution that embodied new ways of thinking about mental health, race, and the substance of citizenship. Harlem's Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic was founded in 1946 as both a practical response to the need for low-cost psychotherapy and counseling for black residents (many of whom were recent migrants to the city) and a model for nationwide efforts to address racial disparities in the provision of mental health care in the United States. The result of a collaboration among the psychiatrist and social critic Dr. Fredric Wertham, the writer Richard Wright, and the clergyman Rev. Shelton Hale Bishop, the clinic emerged in the context of a widespread American concern with the mental health of its citizens. It proved to be more radical than any other contemporary therapeutic institution, however, by incorporating the psychosocial significance of antiblack racism and class oppression into its approach to diagnosis and therapy. Mendes shows the Lafargue Clinic to have been simultaneously a scientific and political gambit, challenging both a racist mental health care system and supposedly color-blind psychiatrists who failed to consider the consequences of oppression in their assessment and treatment of African American patients. Employing the methods of oral history, archival research, textual analysis, and critical race philosophy, Under the Strain of Color contributes to a growing body of scholarship that highlights the interlocking relationships among biomedicine, institutional racism, structural violence, and community health activism.

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Reviewed By

Review Martin Halliwell (2018) Review of "Psychiatry and Racial Liberalism in Harlem, 1936-1968". American Historical Review (pp. 973-974). unapi

Review Dennis Doyle (2016) Review of "Under the Strain of Color: Harlem's Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry". History of Psychiatry (pp. 370-371). unapi

Review Sebastián Gil‐Riaño (2018) Review of "Under the Strain of Color: Harlem's Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry". Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (pp. 62-63). unapi

Review Ellen Dwyer (2017) Review of "Under the Strain of Color: Harlem's Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry". Social History of Medicine (pp. 469-470). 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/CBB251110528/

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Authors & Contributors
Doyle, Dennis
Mooney, Katherine C.
Hatch, Anthony Ryan
Varel, David Alan
Cornelius-Diallo, Alexandra
Simon, Kristi M.
Concepts
African Americans and science
African Americans
Science and race
Racism
Black people
Medicine and race
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
20th century, early
20th century, late
18th century
Places
United States
New York City (New York, U.S.)
Southern states (U.S.)
Scotland
New Zealand
Canada
Institutions
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT
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