A Load off Whose Heart? Psychiatry and the Politics of Respectability and Race Representation in Harlem, 1943-45.

A Load off Whose Heart? Psychiatry and the Politics of Respectability and Race Representation in Harlem, 1943-45. J Hist Med Allied Sci. 2019 Nov 08;: Authors: Doyle D Abstract In wartime Harlem, liberal mental health professionals, eager to serve the black freedom struggle, sought to depict the minds of troubled black children as human without reinforcing pernicious racial stereotypes. This paper examines how psychiatrist Viola W. Bernard and the Community Service Society struggled to portray the black community as both psychologically damaged and morally beyond reproach when publicly presenting the cases of her male and female clients. As a consequence, liberals helped champion the mental health needs of delinquent black males as a matter of racial justice while rendering young unmarried mothers effectively invisible. PMID: 31702006 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: Medical History - Category: History of Medicine Authors: Tags: J Hist Med Allied Sci Source Type: research