Screen Media, Racialization, and Pathologization in the Late 1960s

• In Event: Technological Emergence/Emergency: Screen Media and the Contexts of Carcerality

Abstract

In the late 1960s, when psychiatry faced mounting attacks from the anti-psychiatry movement and from psy survivors propelled to activism by the Civil Rights Movement and when its biomedical model of illness was under contestation, the psy disciplines became fascinated by the possibilities of screen media. Computers beckoned with their promises of efficiency and automation for both clinical practice and mental institution administration, and videotape as a means of providing “therapeutic feedback” was incorporated into a broad array of state mental institutions. I consider the take up of screen media at this time as a means by which new media legitimated psychiatry and by which the psy disciplines’ drive to control their patient-subjects could be re-legitimated just as it was receiving sustained cultural challenges. In particular, this take-up of media technologies is part of the story of how community mental health clinics, funded by states specifically for the care of poor communities of color, ultimately came to serve white middle-class patients instead. I argue that this moment in which screen media were being incorporated into the psy disciplines constructed the treatable psychiatric patient as white, and laid the groundwork for Black affect to be ontologically negated from the terrain of psychiatric discourse, not only within discourse but also within future developments around screen media and mental health. This history ultimately tells us much about today’s Silicon Valley efforts to design automated mental health therapy techniques – in particular, their embeddedness within the spectacularization of the “untreatable” scene of Black “madness.”

Author

• Olivia Banner, The University of Texas at Dallas