This research, supported by the Science, Technology & Society Program at NSF, is a historical study that connects issues of scientific diagnosis and civil rights. Over the past decade, neuroscience has made significant progress toward understanding the neurobiological basis of schizophrenia. Yet, popular attitudes about schizophrenia remain largely unaffected by scientific advances. Surveys of popular opinion consistently link schizophrenia, not to brain biology, but to a host of social misperceptions. Chief among these is the association between schizophrenia and violence. For instance, the percentage of the population who view persons with schizophrenia as being "dangerous or unpredictable" more than doubled over the latter half of the twentieth century, even though research shows that, far from posing a threat to others, people diagnosed with schizophrenia have victimization rates 65 to 130 percent higher than those of the general public.
This project explores the historical disconnect between science and society regarding beliefs about schizophrenia. It studies the surprising and often inadvertent ways in which American beliefs about the criminality of schizophrenia emerged in the 1960s- and 1970s in context of a larger set of conversations about race. Over this vital twenty-year time period, research about aberrations in brain biology unintentionally combined with growing cultural anxieties about civil rights. Meanwhile, reports about new "psychochemical" technologies of symptom control merged with concerns about the "uncontrolled" nature of urban unrest (unrest which was often stereotypically associated with African American communities). As these historical contingencies evolved, the American public, and at times members of the scientific community, increasingly described schizophrenia as a violent social disease, even as biomedicine argued that schizophrenia was a disorder of biological brain function.
The three-part project highlights the complex relationships between science, medicine, and American popular culture. Part one systematically analyzes popular beliefs about the biology of schizophrenia from the 1960s to the present. Part two tracks changing scientific understandings about the biology and race of schizophrenia. Finally, part three explores how popular, scientific, and medical notions of schizophrenia collided within the walls of a particular institution, the Ionia Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ionia, Michigan. The project's larger goal is to argue that stigmatizations of psychiatric disorders need be historically understood if these disorders are to be effectively treated in the present day.
