La psychiatrie de ville après la Grande Migration

Abstract

At the beginning of the 20th century, psychiatric theories and practices concerning the care of the black population underwent a gradual transformation in the United States. While large healthcare institutions had existed for blacks in the South since the 1870s, black migrants often faced a lack of medical and psychiatric care in the northern cities to which they flocked by the thousands. This article reveals how the Lafargue Clinic, founded in the 1940s in the Harlem black ghetto of New York City, was a pioneer in the country's public health landscape as one of the first Psychiatric Clinics specifically dedicated to black patients. Drawing on the collection of Fredric Wertham, the Clinic founder's personal archives held in the Library of Congress, we examine the way in which Harlem psychiatrists came to acknowledge hygienist issues shared all across America: the intervention of psychiatry in debates about contemporary society and the role of expertise played by psychiatrists on subjects such as urbanization, delinquency and criminality, as well as the consideration of social factors in psychiatric theories.

Keywords

• United States
• racism
• psychiatry
• hygienism
• criminality