Judith Weisenfeld's "Black Religion in the Madhouse"

Judith Weisenfeld is Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor in the Department of Religion at Princeton University. Her books include New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration, winner of the 2017 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions.

Weisenfeld applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery's Wake, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Black Religion in the Madhouse describes the transition in the diagnostic categories for mental illness in early twentieth-century US psychiatry from mania and melancholy to dementia praecox and manic-depressive psychosis, the latter categories proposed by German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin. To illustrate the change, I present the case of Charles D., an African American laborer who was admitted to St. Elisabeths Hospital in Washington DC in 1905, diagnosed with acute insanity caused by “religious excitement,” discharged from the hospital and readmitted the same year. On readmission, he was diagnosed as suffering from dementia praecox. While the application of these diagnostic categories was not limited to African Americans, Charles’s case underscores the book’s argument about the prominence of “religious excitement” as a listed cause of insanity for African American patients in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and signals the incorporation of these ideas into the new disease categories, even as the language of “religious excitement” fades away.

On page 99 I write:

As white American psychiatrists embraced Kraepelin’s new disease category in the early twentieth century, they mobilized ideas about race and religion in diagnosing Black patients and used their clinical experiences to theorize more generally about race, religion, and mental illness in ways that linked discourses from the older diagnostic system to the new.

The Page 99 Test works well for my book as it describes a critical turning point in the history of race, religion, and American psychiatry with the adoption of Kraepelin’s system. I argue that, with the turn from long-standing ideas among white American psychiatrists about “racial traits” to a system they presented as more rigorously scientific, sedimented assumptions about Black people’s propensity for superstition and religious excess persisted. In fact, in the early twentieth-century studies white psychiatrists published exploring the incidence of dementia praecox among Black patients, they often highlighted “primitive” religious expression as a helpful diagnostic tool.

At the end of page 99, I note that Emil Kraepelin read work by white American psychiatrists on dementia praecox among African Americans and took their accounts of racialized mental instability as authoritative. While not a central part of the book’s argument, it points to the influence of white physicians’ ideas about African American religion and mental normalcy in psychiatric circles.

Visit Judith Weisenfeld's website.

--Marshal Zeringue