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Podcast: New Books in Medicine
Episode: Judith Weisenfeld, "Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery’s Wake" (NYU Press, 2025)
Description: In the decades after the end of slavery, African Americans were committed to southern state mental hospitals at higher rates as white psychiatrists listed “religious excitement” among the most frequent causes of insanity for Black patients. At the same time, American popular culture and political discourse framed African American modes of spiritual power as fetishism and superstition, cast embodied worship as excessive or fanatical, and labeled new religious movements “cults,” unworthy of respect. As Judith Weisenfeld argues in Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery’s Wake (NYU Press, 2025), psychiatrists’ notions of race and religion became inextricably intert...