Workshop-via Zoom from Australia

Date: Thursday, 9/24

Time: 4-5:15pm

Dr Smith’s book “Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South” documents the impact of racial segregation and the fight for medical civil rights in the state psychiatric hospitals in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi between 1948 and 1972. Drawing on extensive archival and legal records, as well as first-hand accounts, Dr Smith explores the ways that local Black communities and families negotiated mental health care in the context of white supremacy and fought for their rights as citizens. By placing the history of these hospitals in the context of the Civil Rights movement, the book adds to both the history of psychiatry and the history of Civil Rights, demonstrating the multiple terrains on which activists fought to end segregation. In doing so, Smith argues that psychiatry itself was deeply entwined with the Southern racial project, and that Black patients were particularly vulnerable to populist politics. This combination of political expediency and scientific racism created hospitals which operated as little more than prisons in the wake of the plantation, and laid the foundation for racist approaches to mental health care today.

Learning Objectives:

1.Understand the historical context for the development of psychiatric services in the US south

2. Analyze the conditions that cause in mental health service provision and diagnosis

3. Appreciate the importance of civil and disability rights activists in the history of mental health.

For Further Reading:

Kylie Smith, Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South (2026)

Susan Stefan, Wyatt and Psychiatric Jim Crow, 46 Law & Psychol. Rev. 229 (2021-2022)

James A. Tucker, Wyatt v. Stickney: Due Process, “Confusion,” and Consequences, 46 Law & Psychol. Rev. 241 (2021-2022)