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W.E.B. Du Bois Institute
Controllin the Planet
Author(s): Jonathan Metzl
Source: Transition, No. 115, Mad (2014), pp. 23-33
Published by: Indiana University Press on behalf of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute
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Controllin the Planet
a brief history of schizophrenia
Jonathan Metzl
An epidemic of schizophrenia afflicted rap artists in the 1990s and
2000s. At least, that’s how it seemed. In record numbers, rappers from
across the East-West divide suddenly claimed to be schizophrenic. For
instance, in 1995, Natural Born Killaz (a Dr. Dre and Ice Cube collaboration) rapped about their insanity. “Journey with me into the
mind of a maniac,” Dr. Dre rhymed, “doomed to be a killer . . . with a
heart full of terror.” “I’m the unforgiving, psycho-driven murderer /
It’s authentic,” Ice Cube replied, “goddamn it, schizophrenic.” Not to
be outdone, longtime Brentwood hip hop artists EPMD, rapping with
LL Cool J, boasted that they smoked M.C.s
because their rhyme style was “deadly psy- Rap lyrics are the latest
chopath schizophrenic.” Meanwhile, Bizzy installments in a political
Bone’s call to arms, “Thugz Cry,” intoned debate that has evolved
that “we represent the planet, get schizoover the past century
phrenic and panic.”
In psychiatric circles, schizophrenia is (at least) regarding the
considered a serious mental illness that
contested relationships
causes delusions, hallucinations, and social withdrawal. But in rap, schizophrenia between race, madness,
means something else: a mode of defiance, violence, and civil rights.
a boast, or a threat. The term appears frequently when describing competition between rappers. In “Speak Ya
Clout,” the duo Gang Starr rhymes that they are “schizophrenic with
rhyme plus we’re well organized” as a way of warning that they are “stepping rugged and tough.” Schizophrenia also enhances claims of competitive violence—in “16 on Death Row,” 2Pac famously warned that,
“I’m kind of schizophrenic, I’m in this shit to win it.” Schizophrenia
also helps rappers describe collective responses to racism or injustice.
In the multi-artist hit “Everything,” Busta Rhymes calls for action by
rapping, “Panic and schizophrenic, sylvy-Atlantic / Wrap up your face
in ceramic, goddamit we controllin the planet.”
How did a psychiatric term develop rap valence? Of course, such
transformations occur often in rap, a musical form whose lyrics frequently derive power by coopting, decontextualizing, and redefining
Metzl • Controllin the Planet23
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Turn of
Endearment.
Oil Painting. 60
× 36 in. Courtesy of the artist
and EbonNia
Gallery, Dayton,
Ohio. ©2012
James Pate.
heretofore mainstream words with altogether different, and frequently
more critical, meanings. Yet something much larger than mere sampling is at play in rap’s use of the terms schizophrenia and schizophrenic. Rap lyrics are the latest installments in a political debate that
has evolved over the past century (at least) regarding the contested
relationships between race, madness, violence, and civil rights. This
debate put psychiatrists into unknowing conversation with liberation
theorists, Black Power activists, and protest musicians. At stake is a series of existential and material questions about the causes, actions, and
implications of sanity itself.
His behavior tends to be consistent with his delusions
Early psychiatric notions of schizophrenia connoted the polar opposite of Ice Cube’s description of “unforgiving psycho-driven murders.”
Coined by Swiss psychiatrist Paul Eugen Bleuler in 1911, “schizophrenia” initially implied an illness in which patients turned away from reality into a world of fantasy, wishes, and symbols. As an early proponent
of Freud, Bleuler placed the illness on a spectrum with neurosis as a
developmental disorder caused by a “splitting” of the basic functions of
the personality. He thus combined the Greek words for split (schizein)
and mind (phrēn). “I call [the illness] ‘schizophrenia,’ ” he explained,
“because the ‘splitting’ of the different psychic functions is one of its
most important characteristics.”
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Bleuler believed that emotional splitting was accompanied, not by
violence, but by symptoms such as indifference, docility, creativity, and
passion. “Even in the less severe forms of illness,” he wrote, “indifference seems to be the external sign . . . to friends and relations, to vacation or enjoyment, to duties or rights, to
American doctors and
good fortune or bad . . . [A] mother might
show right at the beginning of her illness laypersons linked the
that she is indifferent to the weal and woes new notion of the “split
of her children.”
When the Swiss psychiatrist’s defini- mind” with docile white
tion of illness crossed the Atlantic in the bodies. Psychiatrists
1920s–1950s, American doctors and layperdescribed patients
sons linked the new notion of the “split
mind” with docile white bodies. Psychia- with schizophrenia as
trists described patients with schizophrenia white academics, poets,
as white academics, poets, eccentrics, and
women. For instance, in his 1927 Textbook eccentrics, and women.
of Psychiatry, psychiatrist Arthur P. Noyes argued that persons prone to
schizophrenia included “sensitive” persons who maintained “child-like
facial expressions far past the usual age—an expression of vagueness
and dreaminess.” Such a patient was
quiet, serious, shy, easily embarrassed and without sense
of humor. In school or college he never takes part in
rough games . . . [H]e has a genuine love of nature and
is often found alone in the woods and fields; he may be
extravagantly enraptured by a beautiful sunset.
Similar assumptions played out in American diagnostic manuals.
When schizophrenia first appeared in the 1918 edition of the National
Committee for Mental Hygiene’s Statistical Manual for the Use of Institutions for the Insane, the text explained that “the illness afflicts the seclusive type of personality.” And in 1952, the first edition of the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual (DSM), psychiatry’s diagnostic bible, defined
schizophrenia as a psychological reaction characterized by “emotional
disharmony, unpredictable disturbances in stream of thought,” and
“regressive behavior.”
Given this flowery framework, it is not surprising that many Americans believed that persons with schizophrenia—and particularly white
persons with schizophrenia—were neither to be feared nor avoided.
Schizophrenia often appeared in popular magazines and newspapers in
the 1920s–1950s as a personality disorder brought on by the pressures
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of white civilization. In 1936, the New York Times described schizophrenia as a disorder of “dual personality” found in men of luminosity. Articles explained how brilliant white poets and novelists were touched by
what they called “grandiloquence,” a propensity toward flowery prose
1950s’ advertisements believed to be one of the “telltale phrases
of schizophrenia, the mild form of insanity
for anti-schizophrenia known as split personality.”
Other articles described white, middle
medications touted the
class women driven to insanity by the dual
ways in which treatments
pressures of housework and motherhood.
rendered white women In the 1940s, periodicals such as Ladies’
“clean, cooperative, Home Journal and Better Homes and Gardens
wrote of unhappily married, middle class
and communicative.” white women whose schizophrenic mood
swings were suggestive of “Doctor Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde,” a theme that
also suffused Olivia de Havilland’s infamous depiction, in the 1948 film
The Snake Pit, of a “schizophrenic housewife” named Virginia Stuart
Cunningham. Meanwhile, 1950s-era advertisements for anti-schizophrenia medications touted the ways in which treatments rendered
white women “clean, cooperative, and communicative.”
However, a radical shift happened in the 1960s. In 1968, in the midst
of a political climate marked by profound protest and social unrest,
psychiatry published the second edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual. That text recast the paranoid subtype of schizophrenia as a
disorder of masculinized belligerence.
295.3 Schizophrenia, paranoid type
. . . The patient’s attitude is frequently hostile and aggressive, and his behavior tends to be consistent with
his delusions . . . the patient manifests the mechanism
of projection, which attributes to others characteristics
he cannot accept in himself . . .
The drive for revision was almost certainly grounded in a desire for
clinical accuracy, part of a larger shift from diagnosing mental illness
based on “personalities” to immediately observable “actions.” However,
it is critical to bear in mind that these revisions took place during the
1960s—a period of mass demonstrations against a host of political and
racial evils. Therefore, one cannot ignore the impact, intentional or
not, of the DSM’s authors’ decision to label as potentially pathological, delusional, or paranoid the rationale that hostile political actions
are justifiable responses to the attitudes of others. And the DSM II
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brought about a radical shift in assumptions about the race, gender,
and temperament of schizophrenia as a result.
Growing numbers of psychiatrists asserted that schizophrenia was a
condition that afflicted “Negro men,” and that black forms of the illness
were more hostile and aggressive than were white ones. At the time,
it likely appeared to many Americans that an epidemic of schizophrenia was spreading among angry black men. In fact, psychiatry’s frame
shift produced new categories of schizophrenic illness. Researchers
used DSM II criteria to uncover “hostile” aspects of black schizophrenia, such as paranoia, delusions, or rage, and to draw connections
between schizophrenia and civil rights demonstrations. A number of
studies conflated black schizophrenia with Black Power in order to illustrate evolving understandings of the illness as hostile or violent, using
long-standing stereotypes of manic, crazy black men to demonstrate
“new” forms of schizophrenic illness.
In 1968, psychiatrists Walter Bromberg and Frank Simon described
schizophrenia as a “Protest Psychosis,” whereby black men developed
“hostile and aggressive feelings” and “delusional anti-whiteness” after
listening to the words of Malcolm X, joining the Black Muslims, or
aligning with groups that preached militant resistance to white society.
In that same year, psychiatric researchers Pierce and West argued that
black men developed “delusions, grandiGrowing numbers of
osity, magical thinking, and . . . dangerous
aggressive feelings” when they participated psychiatrists asserted
in civil rights sit-ins.
that schizophrenia
Mainstream newspapers in the 1960s
and 1970s similarly described schizophre- was a condition that
nia as a condition of angry black masculin- afflicted “Negro men,”
ity, warning of schizophrenic black killers and that black forms of
on the loose. “FBI Adds Negro Mental Patient To ‘10 Most Wanted’ List,” warned a the illness were more
Chicago Tribune headline in July 1966, above hostile and aggressive
an article that advised readers to remain
than were white ones.
clear of “Leroy Ambrosia Frazier, an extremely dangerous and mentally unbalanced schizophrenic escapee
from a mental institution.” Hollywood films, such as Samuel Fuller’s
1963 B-movie classic, Shock Corridor, cast the illness as arising in black
men who had participated in civil rights protests. Antipsychotic medication advertisements also shifted to show angry black men. An advertisement for the antipsychotic medication Haldol, which appeared in the
May 1974 Archives of General Psychiatry, featured a cartoon of a distorted
angry African American man shaking an inverted Black Power fist.
The shifting frame surrounding schizophrenia had consequences
in real-world clinical settings: starting in the late 1960s, schizophrenia
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Haldol Advertisement,
Archives of General Psychiatry,
Volume 31, no. 5,
1974, p. 732.
became a diagnosis disproportionately applied to African American
men. For instance, in the 1960s and 1970s, researchers “discovered”
that African American men were “significantly more likely” than white
men to receive schizophrenia diagnoses. And throughout the 1980s and
1990s, a host of articles from leading psychiatric and medical journals
showed that doctors diagnosed the paranoid subtype of schizophrenia
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in African American men five to seven times more often than in white
men.
Let us be maladjusted
A second historical trajectory important for understanding the schizophrenia of rap lies within the rhetoric of civil rights. Here, the split mind
functioned, not as a mental illness, but as a protest identity—an internalized and then projected form of defiance. Martin Luther King, Jr.
frequently used the examples of “schizophrenia” and “madness” to
urge African Americans to psychologically “maladjust” themselves in
the name of nonviolent protest. As he wrote in 1961,
It is no longer a choice between violence and non-violence. It is now either non-violence or non-existence . . .
And so I call upon you to be maladjusted and continue
in the maladjustment that you have already demonstrated, for it may well be that the salvation of our world
lies in the hands of the maladjusted. And so, let us be
maladjusted.
Such language was not unusual for King, a rhetorician who often used
psychological binaries to preach nonviolence. In his famous “Unfulfilled Dreams” sermon, his soaring, elegant, final address at Ebenezer
Baptist Church, King described the psychic split as follows.
It’s there: a tension at the heart of the universe between
good and evil . . . And every time you set out to be good,
there’s something pulling on you, telling you to be evil.
There’s a civil war going on. There is a schizophrenia, as
the psychologists or the psychiatrists would call it, going
on within all of us . . .
King’s use of the term schizophrenia implied an ethical, spiritual divide
that was, at once, universal to mankind and particular to the African
American experience. In his formulation of civil rights, African Americans were always and already divided, their minds split both because of
racism and segregation and because of the choices they faced in their
attempts to change the system.
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Meanwhile, in the rhetorical circles of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Robert F. Williams, and H. Rap Brown, schizophrenia was an ethical response to racism, a carnivalesque inversion which recognized “insanity” as the only sane response to the status quo. In this context, the
language of paranoia, psychosis, and schizophrenia became a means
of pathologizing white society while justifying aggressive self-defense.
To be sure, schizophrenia was a complex term for Black Power, Black
Nationalism, the Nation of Islam, and other groups advocating non-passive resistance or armed self-defense. Many of these movements’ leaders
had been spuriously diagnosed with the illness by the Federal Bureau
of Investigation. The FBI ‘diagnosed’ Malcolm X with “pre-psychotic
paranoid schizophrenia,” and with membership in the “Muslim Cult
of Islam,” in the 1950s. In the early 1960s, the same agency diagnosed
Robert Williams, the controversial head of the Monroe, North Carolina
chapter of the NAACP, as schizophrenic, armed, and dangerous during
his flight from trumped-up kidnapping charges.
Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that a number of activist leaders
located insanity, not within the minds and bodies of persons who fought
back against unjust social systems, but within racists who perpetuated
them. In his influential text, Negroes With Guns, Williams argued that “we
have come to comprehend the nature of racism. It is a mass psychosis.”
Other voices argued that African American violence reflected the natural psychological consequences of violent American racism. The leading advocates of this position were the African American psychiatrists
William Grier and Price Cobbs, whose Malcolm X-inspired 1968 book,
Black Rage, became a national bestseller. In Black Rage, Grier and Cobbs
depicted schizophrenia as a condition of “survival” for black Americans.
Paranoid schizophrenia, they wrote, was a potentially violent state that
emerged when black men were pushed into a split between adhering
to the mores of white society and “fighting back” against them in order
to stay alive.
LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) famously likened “the whole situation
of the Negro in America” to a form of playacting, in which activist
intellectuals were forced into a split between a “Negro” self and an
“American self.” In contradistinction to King, Jones articulated this
split as necessary for social transformation: “To see this schizophrenia
between being American and being alienated from America, well, that
alienation has reached a point where a lot of people value it.”
These and other thinkers seem to draw, not on psychiatry or medicine, but on black philosophical and literary traditions, in defining
schizophrenia as a condition forged in response to racism. For instance,
Langston Hughes described a “Jim Crow shock” of black soldiers whose
insanity resulted, not from battle fatigue, but from the internalized impact of American racism and segregation. And as is well known, W.E.B.
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Du Bois described an African American “double consciousness,” a requisite “two-ness” of being “an American, a Negro; two warring ideals in
one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn
asunder.” This notion of a structural, psychical split forged in adaptive response to Paranoid schizophrenia
white society coursed through black polit- was a potentially violent
ical thought for much of the next century.
Double consciousness figured prominently state that emerged
in the work of 1940s and 1950s intellectu- when black men were
als, such as Richard Wright and Ralph Elli- pushed into a split
son. Similar splits also appeared in debates
about the psychological impact of racist between adhering to
segregation beyond the United States. In the mores of white
the colonial context, the psychiatrist Frantz
society and “fighting
Fanon, whose ideas extensively influenced
Black Power activists, defiantly described back” against them in
an “internal divide” that resulted when “the order to stay alive.
Negro” entered a white symbolic order.
“The black man has two dimensions,” Fanon wrote in Black Skins, White
Masks. “One is with his fellows, the other with the white man . . . That
this self-division is a result of colonial subjugation is beyond question.”
Violence is not our pathology—it is a response to yours
One way to understand rap’s use of “schizophrenic” as an autobiographical moniker is to see it as a reappropriation of psychiatric authority.
You diagnosed us as aggressive, violent, and schizophrenic, rap lyrics
contend, but we claim your racist diagnosis as our own. “Stepping
rugged and tough,” your stigmatized disease is our threat; your assumptions about the pathology of black men who are “assaultive and
belligerent” are reversed to become our mode of rebellion.
Yet when read through black philosophical thought, rap’s invocation of schizophrenia becomes more complicated than a mere rearticulation of Western medical terminology. Instead, the condition singer
Mamie Smith described in 1920 as the “crazy blues”—in which going
crazy functioned as a means to fight back against racial injustice—clearly
predated the DSM by half a century, if not more. This lineage once allowed civil rights thinkers to signify the adaptive importance of, rather
than the pathologization of, defiance to “Caucasian values.” And, it
helps explain why schizophrenia became a potent metaphor in rap.
History suggests, in other words, that when they call themselves
schizophrenic, rappers call on traditions distinct from psychiatric ones.
And as such, rap’s schizophrenia invokes more than mental illness;
it also conveys a hidden critique of racist society, and promotes an
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3K. Charcoal.
40 × 30 in.
Courtesy of the
Arthur Primas
Collection and
EbonNia Gallery,
Dayton, Ohio.
©2012 James
Pate.
identity forged through time and experience and then worn as a mark
of strength and survival, rather than as a stigma.
One can critique hip hop artists for perpetuating stigmatizing
misperceptions about schizophrenia as an illness of uncontrollable aggression and hostility. In “Symptoms of Insanity,” onetime Psychopathic
Records artist Esham warns that, because of symptoms of insanity, “I’m
quick to pull the trigger . . . / A schizophrenic, so many panic.” Rapping with Esham, Dayton Family rapper Bootleg menacingly raps that
his schizophrenia causes him to “sleep wit’ a glock.” Yet, such critiques
risk simplifying the multiple meanings of schizophrenia in American
culture. Popular American usage of these terms emerged from several rhetorical traditions. Psychiatry was one locale, but so was African
American philosophical thought. The former discourse took its cues
from Bleuler and the DSM, and subsequently defined schizophrenia
as an illness that resided in patients. But the latter took from Du Bois,
Frederick Douglass, Robert Williams, Fanon, and other theorists whose
work helped code schizophrenia as a healthy adaptation to an insane,
racist society. Martin Luther King used schizophrenia to urge nonviolent resistance. Amiri Baraka used the same term to encourage revolt.
In both cases—and belying a historical reality often forgotten in our
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multicultural age—the goal was deeper than simply getting along. The
goal was actual change.
Remnants of this latter trajectory reverberate through rap, a musical
form whose early innovators drew inspiration from the race politics
of the 1960s and 1970s. Grandmaster Flash’s classic 1982 song, “The
Message,” and 1980s Public Enemy albums By Any Means Necessary
and It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back are but a few examples of rap’s initial political engagement—a mantle brilliantly picked
up by, for instance, the searing critique in
Ice Cube’s 2008 “Gangsta Rap Made Me Yes, we are black, male,
Do It.” Intended or not, use of the terms and violent, presentschizophrenia and schizophrenic connect day rappers concur.
2Pac’s fight against the legal system and
Bizzy Bone’s call for revolution to King, Du But this violence is not
Bois, and also perhaps to Blues traditions our pathology—it is a
that preserve a memory of a time when goresponse to yours.
ing crazy was a way of resisting the slave
master’s authority. Meanwhile, Rhymes, Bone, Thugs, and others turn
Bromberg’s and Simon’s 1968 notion of a protest psychosis on its head.
Yes, we are black, male, and violent, present-day rappers concur. But
this violence is not our pathology—it is a response to yours.
Put another way, rap’s use of the terms schizophrenia and schizophrenic connotes, not a disease, but an identity claimed in response
to a system that misperceives survival strategies as insanity. Rap lyrics
meanwhile remind us that diagnosis is an inherently political interaction because diagnostic terminology is inherently politicized. Psychiatric definitions provide levels of clarity for patients and families
struggling to understand painful life events. But wholesale acceptance
of psychiatric terms and frameworks involves entry into a potentially
racially subjugating symbolic order, in which biomedical definitions of
illness supplant cultural or political ones.
If rap lyrics are in any way reflective of larger wholes, then rap’s
rhymes suggest that schizophrenia and schizophrenic remain contested
terms within an ongoing clinical-cultural dialectic. On one hand,
schizophrenia articulates the expert opinion of the doctor, whose
trained knowledge is requisite for a correct diagnosis. On the other
hand, schizophrenia signifies a rejection of medical authority by a
power that is vested in the people. And Goddamit we controllin the planet. Metzl • Controllin the Planet33
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