As I scrolled through my Facebook news feed, I discovered the following artwork here, being shared by the page, “Psychologic-Anarchist,” and originally posted it to my own wall, along with commentary…
“Did you know? Before the Civil War, some psychiatrists diagnosed slaves with what they called drapetomania: “a mental illness in which the slave possessed an irrational desire for freedom and a tendency to try to escape.”
My Commentary: Psychiatry is historically-rooted in racism, oppression, pseudo-science, and propping up the power of the State. These quacks once treated the human desire for freedom as a diagnosable disease.
Also, look up “dysaesthesia aethiopica,” then go back even further, and research Benjamin Rush, MD , the “father of American Psychiatry,” to learn about the racist disease he invented, called “negritude.” His ugly mug was featured on the official American Psychiatric Association seal for almost a century!
(All original portions of this work, by Rayn Kleipe, are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, while all redistributed links, images, sounds, videos, and writings are protected under 17 U.S.C. § 107: Fair Use, or under Public Domain)
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