Join Kylie Smith, BA, PhD on November 1, 2022 at 6:00pm when she presents a virtual seminar on "Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South" as part of the CF Reynolds History of Medicine Lecture Series. This seminar is co-sponsored by the the Pitt Center for Research, Ethics and Society Initiative of Pitt Research and the Center for Bioethics and Health Law.

Dr. Smith is Associate Professor and an Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow for Nursing & the Humanities at the Emory University Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing in Atlanta. She is the author of Talking Therapy: Knowledge & Power in American Psychiatric Nursing (2020). 

Psychiatric hospitals in the United States have always functioned as spaces of both custody and care. In the mid 20th century legislation was passed in an attempt to improve conditions and treatment practices for patients, but these developments were delayed in the South due to an insistence on racial segregation. In this talk, I draw on extensive archival sources from my book in progress to show the ways that Southern psychiatric hospitals in the mid twentieth century had become home to many thousands of Black patients with mental and physical disability, where treatment and care was custodial at best, violent and abusive at worst. Yet these hospitals were also the scene of important Civil Rights activism in the 1960s which revealed the ways that psychiatry functioned as a tool of white supremacy. This activism led to the end of segregation, but it could not fix the racism that underpins the provision of mental health and disability care today.

Zoom Link: Click here to attend and enter this password: 684488

For More information on please contact the Center for Bioethics and Health Law at bioethics@pitt.edu.