Race, Politics and the Criminalization of Mental Illness

Jonathan Metzl is the Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor of Sociology and Psychiatry, and the director of the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He received his M.D. from the University of Missouri, M.A. in humanities/poetics and psychiatric internship/residency from Stanford University, and Ph.D. in American culture from the University of Michigan. A 2008 Guggenheim fellow, Professor Metzl has written extensively for medical, psychiatric, and popular publications. His books include “The Protest Psychosis,” “Prozac on the Couch,” and “Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality.”

Colorado College’s History Department is launching a new initiative, aimed at exploring how the past informs current efforts to remediate urgent social concerns, and will begin by examining criminality and correction.

CC’s new Social Issues and Historical Contexts (SIHC) initiative, funded by a three-year, $200,000 grant from an anonymous donor, recognizes that in recent decades, professional scholarship in history has tended to shift from national, political, and period-specific investigations to transnational and trans-historical issues common to human experience across time and space.

Embracing this movement, the SIHC program brings together Colorado College students, faculty, staff, and community members in wide-ranging discussions with regional and national experts in public and non-profit agencies.