Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Misperceptions that persons with schizophrenia are violent or dangerous lie at the heart of stigmatizations of the disease. For instance, numerous studies have found that physicians, police officers, and the general public overestimate the risk of aggression in patients with schizophrenia more often than in other patient groups. My project tells the story of how these modern-day American conceptualizations of schizophrenic patients as violent emerged during the civil-rights era of the 1950s-1970s in response to a larger set of conversations about race. I integrate institutional, professional, and cultural discourses in order to trace shifts in U.S. popular and medical understandings of schizophrenia from a disease of white docility to one of “Negro” hostility, and from a disease that was nurtured to one that was feared. The first and longest section of the paper tracks the medcalization of race and schizophrenia within a particular institution, the Ionia Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Located in a largely white area of rural Michigan, Ionia was the receiving hospital for prisoners deemed mentally ill by the courts and penal institutions throughout the state. I access an extensive archive of medical records and administrative documents to show that, starting in the 1950s, schizophrenia became a diagnostic term disproportionately applied to the hospital’s growing population of African American men for reasons having as much to do with perceived threats of violence as with criteria for mental illness. The paper’s second section contextualizes the Ionia case histories within shifting psychiatric definitions of schizophrenia, as read through an extensive analysis of published case studies and classification systems. Of particular interest are the ways in which published case studies of the 1960s and 1970s explicitly connected the clinical presentations of African American men with the politics of the civil rights movement in ways that, in its worst moments, treated aspirations for liberation and civil rights as symptoms of mental illness. Finally, the third section reads these shifts in psychiatric nosology within changing American cultural concerns about black masculinity. I use media representations, films, music, protest memoirs, and literary texts to explore ways in which civil-rights era debates about the role of violence in promoting social change mapped onto descriptions of schizophrenia as a violent disease. I also show how proponents of Black Power appropriated psychiatric language to dramatize a response to the “insanity” of racism through militant resistance.

Triangulating the historical connections between institutional forces, psychiatric practices, and civil-rights politics ultimately helps me grapple with some of the seemingly naturalized characteristics of present-day schizophrenia discourse—characteristics that often appear denatured of their explicit connections to race. These include cultural tropes of angry, homeless mentally ill persons or findings demonstrating that persons with schizophrenia reside in prisons far more often than in psychiatric care facilities.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The experience, expression, and communication of happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, disgust, and pleasantness-unpleasantness were studied in Schizophrenia and Comparison samples using the slide-viewing technique. Results indicated the magnitude of differences between Schizophrenia and Comparison participants were reflected in the following mean effect sizes: self-reported emotional experience .18; other-reported emotional expression .26; emotion communication accuracy .42. Corresponding mean effect sizes for males only were .16, .19, and .34. Relative to Comparison participants, emotional experience and expression were slightly or moderately less appropriate in Schizophrenia participants, but communication accuracy was strongly different and uniformly lower. These findings suggest that the greater part of “inappropriate affect” in schizophrenia involves spontaneous emotional communication. This is discussed in relation to research on Expressed Emotion (EE) and the classic Double-Bind hypothesis (DBH), suggesting that specific sorts of manipulations of the environment of emotional communication in schizophrenia patients may have therapeutically beneficial effects.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Scholars and journalists have difficulties predicting the events related to Iran (IRI) because this state behaves like a schizophrenic individual rather than rationally.

Publication Type: Proceeding

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The Israeli doctrine of Nuclear Opacity has been traditionally perceived as the last Israeli taboo. The paper?s primary objective is therefore to evaluate the political status of nuclear opacity in Israel. The main questions posed are: 1) does nuclear opacity continue to enjoy a hegemonic status as many claim; 2) what factors account for either threats to that opacity, its partial absence, or its weakness. The paper takes an historical institutionalist approach to evaluate both the emergence and evolution of the doctrine, and presents a set of Gramscian conditions (that were later adopted and reformulated by Ian Lustick) to assess the current political status of the doctrine. The three Gramscian/Lustickian categories of variables that are said to be capable of unseating a hegemonic belief are then tested against the case study of Israel?s doctrine of nuclear opacity. They include a)an exogenous shock that produces substantial discrepancies between the claims of the beliefs and the political realities the doctrine purports to describe; b) the existence of a widely acceptable counter-hegemonic alternatives for an Israeli nuclear policy. Among these alternatives one can mention the recent and repeated calls for Israel to establish a NWFZ in the Middle East as well as claims to abandon opacity in favor of an overt nuclear posture; and finally c) the presence of political, academic and cultural entrepreneurs capable of carrying ideas with hegemonic potential into the political arena. In this section I make clear the point that it is the absence of political leadership, or the de-politization of the nuclear issue in Israel, that best explains the continued integrity of the hegemonic status of nuclear opacity. Yet, at the same time, the recent wave of publications on this issue, including the illuminating work of Avner Cohen, should serve as instances of ?cultural? or ?ideational? entrepreneurship that those of us analyzing the security/strategic aspects of any military doctrine should not overlook.Theoretically, this paper takes an original view of analyzing processes of institutionalization and de-institutionalization of military doctrines from an angle that is rarely examined in the subfield of strategic studies. The analytical framework it advances can be generalized to assess the status of other institutionalized military doctrines such as the Syrian doctrine of Strategic Parity. Finally, the paper assesses policy implications regarding the future of nuclear opacity in Israel as well as illuminates important undertheorized aspects in the traditional literature on military doctrines in international relations.