Black Celebrities, Selfhood, and Psychiatry in the Civil Rights Era: The Wiltwyck School for Boys and the Floyd Patterson House

Doyle, Dennis

doi:10.1093/shm/hku098

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…She worked with Polier in New York on innovative methods to intervene with troubled children, including young people in Harlem, noting the increased likelihood that children of color would be incarcerated rather than treated. Kenworthy had been involved with Polier's efforts to create a therapeutic space for children of color-the Wiltwyck School-to address accusations of racism within mental health structures (Doyle, 2015). 23 By the 1950s, the mental health community in Harlem was especially active in making the case that racial segregation was harmful to Black children (Markowitz & Rosner, 1996), and during and after the 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education, the problem of segregation was frequently addressed by mental health professionals (Herman, 1995).…”

Section: Doing the Right Thingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Marion Kenworthy and values in the history of American child psychiatry.

Hirshbein

2024

American Journal of Orthopsychiatry

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was a pioneering child psychiatrist, mental hygiene and child guidance leader, and early member of the American Orthopsychiatric Association (now the Global Alliance for Behavioral Health and Social Justice). Throughout her illustrious career, Kenworthy advocated for values in the emerging field of child psychiatry, especially around prevention of mental illness, interdisciplinary collaboration, and social justice. Kenworthy's history provides not only an illustration of the importance of values in the work related to children but also a reminder of perspectives that can get lost in the contemporary focus on individual diagnoses and treatments (especially with pharmaceuticals). The social, cultural, and economic problems encountered by Kenworthy and her contemporaries remain as challenges in the present and the future, ones that require ongoing interdisciplinary collaboration and advocacy. Public Policy Relevance StatementKenworthy's history helps to illustrate the rich complexity of child mental health and the perspectives that have been obscured with the push in child psychiatry toward a focus on psychopathology. The work of the Global Alliance for Behavioral Health and Social Justice continues the work conducted by Kenworthy and her colleagues, a reminder of the importance of more explicit advocacy work for all children.This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.

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Section: Doing the Right Thingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Marion Kenworthy and values in the history of American child psychiatry.

Hirshbein

2024

American Journal of Orthopsychiatry

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“…To change that rate, Wiltwyck's liberal directors believed that Wiltwyck needed to provide much more followup care-especially in the city. Between 1954 and 1962, Wiltwyck opened two half-way house facilities in New York City, one in St. Albans, Queens and one on 18 th Street named for champion boxer and former Wiltwyck student Floyd Patterson (Doyle, 2015). Aftercare was now far more intense and psychiatric in orientation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Slums, race and mental health in New York (1938–1965)

Doyle

2018

Palgrave Commun

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Claude Brown's seminal 1965 memoir "Manchild in the Promised Land" appeared when Americans were trying to make sense of the Watts Rebellion of 1965. A "bildungsroman", Brown's autobiography details how he, a former juvenile delinquent and residential treatment center client, became a stable adult once he left his troubled Harlem neighborhood. This paper argues that Brown's book revealed just how much liberal midtwentieth century efforts to combat poverty and crime in segregated black communities by offering more mental health services struggled to fully grasp and address the relationship between mental health and environment. Between 1938 and 1965, officials and mental health experts with the Wiltwyck School for Boys, New York Domestic Relations Court and the New York Bureau of Child Guidance imagined that Harlem would become a more stable, lawabiding community if populated with emotionally healthier people. Methodologically, this paper compares the archival record of those programs' goals with Brown's memoir. Brown's own experience as both a former charge of those institutions and a resident of Harlem led him to doubt that urban ghettoes were environmentally suited to support individuals struggling to overcome mental illness. In locating Brown's recollection of his postwar youth within the context of local efforts to provide New York City's black juvenile delinquents with psychiatric care in the postwar era, it becomes apparent that those liberal policies and programs were designed to produce therapeutic outcomes that proved difficult to sustain amid the challenging circumstances residents faced in socioeconomically depressed communities. As an intervention into the burgeoning literature on the US history of race and psychiatry, this research represents one of the first attempts to compare the intentions of mental health professionals seeking to improve the health care of African Americans and the perspectives of their African American clients.

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Current Bibliography of the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences, 2017

2017

Isis

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Black Celebrities, Selfhood, and Psychiatry in the Civil Rights Era: The Wiltwyck School for Boys and the Floyd Patterson House

Cited by 3 publications

References 1 publication

Marion Kenworthy and values in the history of American child psychiatry.

Marion Kenworthy and values in the history of American child psychiatry.

Slums, race and mental health in New York (1938–1965)

Current Bibliography of the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences, 2017

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