Strangers to Ourselves, page 25
the Hole—three buildings: “Taylor Homes: The Demo of the ‘Hole,’” South Street Journal 5, no. 3, Summer 1998, 1.
“It’s a hell hole”: Linnet Myers, “Hell in the Hole,” Chicago Tribune, April 12, 1998.
By the nineties: Pam Belluck, “End of a Ghetto: A Special Report; Razing the Slums to Rescue the Residents,” The New York Times, September 6, 1998.
“Goddamn public aid penitentiary”: Quoted in Belluck, 26.
“gunfire might just as well”: George Papajohn and William Recktenwald, “Living in a War Zone Called Taylor Homes,” Chicago Tribune, March 10, 1993.
Illinois had the nation’s highest rate: Arthur Horton, “Disproportionality in Illinois Child Welfare: The Need for Improved Substance Abuse Services,” Journal of Alcoholism and Drug Dependence 2, no. 1 (2013): 145.
“I was in book heaven”: Naomi Gaines, “Victory: A Memoir,” 49. Naomi’s manuscript is 264 pages and dedicated to her twin sons. She wrote most of it in prison.
“a useful place of healing”: bell hooks, Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem (New York: Atria Books, 2002), 205. hooks also writes, “I have found myself saying again and again that mental health is the revolutionary antiracist frontier African Americans must collectively explore.”
For a Black patient to reveal her fears: John Head, Standing in the Shadows: Understanding and Overcoming Depression in Black Men (New York: Broadway Books, 2004), 3.
“Many black folks worry”: hooks, Rock My Soul, 23.
“Black people’s skin”: Kelly M. Hoffman et al., “Racial Bias in Pain Assessment and Treatment Recommendations, and False Beliefs About Biological Differences Between Blacks and Whites,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 16 (April 2016): 4296.
“Dysaesthesia Aethiopica”: Christopher D. E. Willoughby, “Running Away from Drapetomania: Samuel A. Cartwright, Medicine, and Race in the Antebellum South,” Journal of Southern History 84, no. 3 (August 2018): 579.
“indifferent to punishment or even to life”: Quoted in Cathy McDaniels-Wilson, “The Psychological Aftereffects of Racialized Sexual Violence,” in Gendered Resistance: Women, Slavery, and the Legacy of Margaret Garner, ed. Mary E. Frederickson and Delores M. Walters (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 195. Cartwright also coined another mental disorder called “Drapetomania, or the diseases causing slaves to run away.” For more context on Cartwright, see Jonathan Metzl’s The Protest Psychosis, which offers a groundbreaking discussion of racism in Civil Rights–era psychiatry.
“partial insensibility of the skin”: Quoted in Bob Myers, “‘Drapetomania’: Rebellion, Defiance and Free Black Insanity in the Antebellum United States” (PhD diss., UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2014), 7. See also Samuel A. Cartwright, “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal (1851).
more Black Americans were migrating: John Biewen, “Moving Up: Part Two,” broadcast by Minnesota Public Radio, August 7, 1997.
“Black women have either been”: Simone Schwarz-Bart and André Schwarz-Bart, In Praise of Black Women: Ancient African Queens (Houston: Modus Vivendi Publications, 2001), vii.
the coffee-table book: James Allen et al., Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms Publishers, 1999).
originally part of an exhibition: “Death by Lynching,” The New York Times, March 16, 2000, www.nytimes.com/2000/03/16/opinion/death-by-lynching.html.
“any notion of self-coherence”: Joseph R. Winters, Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 18.
“Melancholy registers the experience”: Quoted in Winters, 19–20.Winters is paraphrasing an argument made by Anne A. Cheng in The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden Grief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Barred from full recognition: For more on racial melancholy, see José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 74; David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, “A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 10, no. 4 (2000): 667–700; Cheng, The Melancholy of Race.
“That’s what makes it”: Quoted in Louise Bernard, “National Maladies: Narratives of Race and Madness in Modern America” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2005), 8.
“She believes her depression”: This chapter draws from thousands of pages of Naomi’s records: from emergency rooms and hospitals, Ramsey County Jail, Shakopee Correctional Facility, and the Minnesota Security Hospital. Many of these documents were sent to me in response to FOIA requests to the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office. With Naomi’s permission, Dennis Gerhardstein, the public information officer there, worked for half a year to help collect and then share these pages with me.
“insanity was very rare”: Martin Summers, “‘Suitable Care of the African When Afflicted with Insanity’: Race, Madness, and Social Order in Comparative Perspective,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 84, no. 1 (2010): 68. The original study referenced is “Exemption of the Cherokee Indians and Africans from Insanity,” The American Journal of Insanity 1 (1845): 288.
“Where there is no civilization”: George M. Beard, American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1881), 164.
“prior to the war”: Quoted in John S. Hughes, “Labeling and Treating Black Mental Illness in Alabama, 1861–1910,” The Journal of Southern History 58, no. 3 (August 1993): 437.
“insane and idiots”: Quoted in Albert Deutsch, “The First U.S. Census of the Insane (1840) and Its Uses as Pro-Slavery Propaganda,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 15, no. 5 (May 1944): 471. See also Calvin Warren, “Black Interiority, Freedom, and the Impossibility of Living,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 38, no. 2 (2016): 113.
“The African is incapable”: Quoted in Warren, 113.
“are not only far happier”: “Reflections on the Census of 1840,” Southern Literary Messenger 9, no. 6 (June 1843): 350.
“furnish little else”: “Reflections on the Census of 1840,” 350.
the census was riddled with mistakes: Warren, “Black Interiority,” 114.
“one of the most amazing tissues”: Deutsch, “The First U.S. Census,” 475.
“civilization is not to be donned”: Arrah B. Evarts, “Dementia Precox in the Colored Race,” The Psychoanalytic Review 1 (January 1913): 393.
“strangers within our gates”: Arrah B. Evarts, “The Ontogenetic Against the Phylogenetic Elements in the Psychoses of the Colored Race,” The Psychoanalytic Review 3 (January 1916): 287.
“demanded an adjustment”: Evarts, “Dementia Precox,” 394.
Like the Parsis: Waltraud Ernst, Colonialism and Transnational Psychiatry: The Development of an Indian Mental Hospital in British India, c. 1925–1940 (London: Anthem Press, 2013).
“They never reproduce”: Mary O’Malley, “Psychoses in the Colored Race,” The American Journal of Psychiatry 71 (October 1914): 314.
“Their sorrows and anxieties”: O’Malley, 327.
the suicide rate for African American adults: Warren Breed, “The Negro and Fatalistic Suicide,” Pacific Sociological Review 13, no. 3 (September 1970): 156–62. See also James A. Weed, “Suicide in the United States: 1958–1982,” in Mental Health, United States 1985, ed. Carl A. Taube and Sally A. Barrett (Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Mental Health, 1985), 135–45; Judith M. Stillion and Eugene E. McDowell, Suicide Across the Life Span: Premature Exits (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1996), 18–20; “Racial and Ethnic Disparities,” Suicide Prevention Resource Center website, sprc.org/scope/racial-ethnic-disparities; Ronald W. Maris, Alan L. Berman, and Morton M. Silverman, Comprehensive Textbook of Suicidology (New York: Guilford Press, 2000), 75; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics System, National Vital Statistics Reports 52, no. 3 (September 2003): 10; Deborah M. Stone, Christopher M. Jones, and Karin A. Mack, “Changes in Suicide Rates—United States, 2018–2019,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 70 (2021): 261–68.
Suicides may end up classified: Head, Standing in the Shadows, 30.
suicide has historically been: Keven E. Early and Ronald L. Akers, “‘It’s a White Thing’: An Exploration of Beliefs About Suicide in the African-American Community,” Deviant Behavior 14, no. 4 (1993): 277.
“some veteran southern psychiatrists”: Arthur J. Prange and M. M. Vitols, “Cultural Aspects of the Relatively Low Incidence of Depression in Southern Negroes,” International Journal of Social Psychiatry 8, no. 2 (1962): 105.
“As a rule blacks don’t”: Quoted in Kevin E. Early, Religion and Suicide in the African-American Community (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), 42.
“almost a complete denial”: Early, 81.
“bold up, brace our shoulders”: Quoted in Early, 43.
“Negro self-esteem”: Abram Kardiner and Lionel Ovesey, The Mark of Oppression: Explorations in the Personality of the American Negro (New York: W. W. Norton, 1951), 387.
“There is only one way”: Kardiner and Ovesey, 387.
“Modern psychiatry got on its feet”: Richard Wright, “Psychiatry Comes to Harlem,” Free World 12, no. 2 (September 1946): 51.
“chronic human need”: Wright, 49.
Wright helped found: Dennis A. Doyle, Psychiatry and Racial Liberalism in Harlem, 1936–1968 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2016), 108.
“the Negroes of Mississippi”: Wright, “Psychiatry Comes to Harlem,” 49.
“the will to survive”: Wright, 51.
the clinic shut down: Gabriel N. Mendes, Under the Strain of Color: Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 160.
“brutal awareness”: Quoted in George Ritzer and Jeffrey Stepnisky, Sociological Theory: Tenth Edition (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2018), 562.
“may ask what we have”: Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 138.
“I know nothing about her”: Quoted in Rey Chow, “The Politics of Admittance: Female Sexual Agency, Miscegenation, and the Formation of Community in Frantz Fanon,” in Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives, ed. Anthony C. Allessandrini (London: Routledge, 1999), 39.
Five Percent Nation: Felicia M. Miyakawa, Five Percenter Rap: God Hop’s Music, Message, and Black Muslim Mission (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 68.
“most extreme suspension”: Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 49.
“It feels somewhat like a gas bubble”: Young, 48.
the largest public-housing complex: Sudhir Venkatesh, “Midst the Handguns’ Red Glare,” Whole Earth 97 (Summer 1999): 41.
Four years earlier: Dirk Johnson, “6 Children Found Strangled After Mother Confesses to 911,” The New York Times, September 5, 1998, www.nytimes.com/1998/09/05/us/6-children-found-strangled-after-mother-confesses-to-911.html.
“I don’t know why”: Quoted in Lourdes Medrano Leslie, Curt Brown, and staff writers, “A Young Mother Accused of Murder,” Star Tribune, November 15, 1998.
The McDonough Homes housed: “Choice, Place and Opportunity: An Equity Assessment of the Twin Cities Region,” Twin Cities Metropolitan Council website, metrocouncil.org/Planning/Projects/Thrive-2040/Choice-Place-and-Opportunity/FHEA/CPO-Sect-5.aspx.
particularly South Asian refugees: Bruce T. Downing et al., “The Hmong Resettlement Study: Site Report, Minneapolis–St. Paul, Minnesota” (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Refugee Resettlement, October 1984), 3.
among the most segregated: “Most to Least Segregated Cities,” Othering & Belonging Institute website, belonging.berkeley.edu/most-least-segregated-cities.
communities with less “ethnic density”: Sophie J. Baker et al., “The Ethnic Density Effect in Psychosis: A Systematic Review and Multilevel Meta-Analysis,” The British Journal of Psychiatry (2021): 1–12.
For people of color, the risk: T. M. Luhrmann, “Social Defeat and the Culture of Chronicity: Or, Why Schizophrenia Does So Well Over There and So Badly Here,” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 31 (May 2007): 135–72.
Kenyan activist Wangarĩ Muta Maathai: Sophie Mbugua, “Wangari Maathai: The Outspoken Conservationist,” Deutsche Welle website, March 6, 2020, www.dw.com/en/wangari-maathai-the-outspoken-conservationist/a-52448394.
“speculate directly”: Lorna A. Rhodes, Emptying Beds: The Work of an Emergency Psychiatric Unit (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 40.
“can be described”: Rhodes, 14.
“the ‘unconscious’ of psychiatry”: Rhodes, 31.
psychoanalytic insight was often achieved: Critiquing a rigid approach, D. W. Winnicott writes, “The patient is not helped if the analyst says: ‘Your mother was not good enough … your father really seduced you … your aunt dropped you.’ Changes come in an analysis when the traumatic factors enter the psycho-analytic material in the patient’s own way, and within the patient’s omnipotence.” See D. W. Winnicott, “The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 41 (1960): 585.
“the accused was laboring”: Quoted in “Insanity Defense,” Legal Information Institute website, www.law.cornell.edu/wex/insanity_defense.
“Remuneration with him”: Quoted in Benjamin F. Hall, The Trial of William Freeman for the Murder of John G. Van Nest, Including the Evidence and the Arguments of Counsel, with the Decision of the Supreme Court Granting a New Trial, and an Account of the Death of the Prisoner, and of the Post-mortem Examination of His Body by Amariah Brigham, M. D., and Others (Auburn, NY: Derby, Miller & Co., 1848), 502.
“You have been tried for killing”: Kenneth J. Weiss and Neha Gupta, “America’s First M’Naghten Defense and the Origin of the Black Rage Syndrome,” The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law 46, no. 4 (December 2018): 509.
“shocked beyond the power of expression”: William H. Seward, Argument of William H. Seward, in Defence of William Freeman, on His Trial for Murder, at Auburn, July 21st and 22d, 1846 (Auburn, NY: H. Oliphant, printer, 1846), 4.
“in the abstract”: Seward, 8.
“I have never seen”: Quoted in Hall, The Trial of William Freeman, 501.
“When the framers of the Constitution”: Rule 20 Evaluation, written by Gregory A. Hanson, assistant director of psychological services, and Jennifer Service, Minnesota Security Hospital clinical director, October 7, 2003, 1–29.
“hesitant, quiet”: This chapter draws from more than six hundred pages of notes and assessments from mental-health staff at Shakopee, obtained through a records request (with Naomi’s permission) from the Minnesota Department of Corrections and from the Minnesota Department of Human Services.
Minnesota’s state governor Luther Youngdahl: Susan Bartlett Foote, The Crusade for Forgotten Souls: Reforming Minnesota’s Mental Institutions, 1946–1954 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), xiii.
A quarter of them: Albert Q. Maisel, “Scandal Results in Real Reforms,” Life, November 12, 1951, 152.
“particeps criminis”: Luther W. Youngdahl, “The New Frontier in Mental Health,” speech at the American Psychiatric Association convention, Detroit, Michigan, May 4, 1950, mn.gov/mnddc/past/pdf/50s/50/50-NFM-LWY.pdf.
“The roots of demonology”: Luther W. Youngdahl, “Statement by Governor Luther W. Youngdahl at the Burning of Restraints” (speech), Anoka, Minnesota, October 31, 1949, mn.gov/mnddc/past/pdf/40s/49/49-SGL-Youngdahl.pdf.
“There is no such thing as a rich patient”: Youngdahl, “The New Frontier,” 6.
“cold mercy of custodial isolation”: John F. Kennedy, Message from the President of the United States Relative to Mental Illness and Mental Retardation, 88th Cong., 1963, H. Doc., serial 12565, 3.
“predictable problems of living”: D. G. Langsley, “The Community Mental Health Center: Does It Treat Patients?,” Hospital and Community Psychiatry 12 (December 1980): 815.
“socially maladjusted”: E. Fuller Torrey, American Psychosis: How the Federal Government Destroyed the Mental Illness Treatment System (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 78.
“For the most massive movement”: Torrey, 93.
more than two-thirds of women incarcerated: Jennifer Bronson and Marcus Berzofsky, “Indicators of Mental Health Problems Reported by Prisoners and Jail Inmates, 2011–12,” U.S. Department of Justice special report. Open-file report available at www.themarshallproject.org/documents/3872819-Indicators-of-Mental-Health-Problems-Reported-by. For a great overview of the intersection between mental-health care and criminal justice, see Alisa Roth, Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness (New York: Basic Books, 2018).
the number of women incarcerated: “Incarceration Trends in Minnesota,” Vera Institute of Justice website, www.vera.org/downloads/pdfdownloads/state-incarceration-trends-minnesota.pdf.
“Freedom is the test”: Quoted in Thomas M. Daly, For the Good of the Women: A Short History of the Minnesota Correctional Facility Shakopee (Daly Pub.: 2004), 7.
helped found the prison: Daly, 7.
roughly 16 percent of the women: “Minnesota Correctional Facility: Shakopee Inmate Profile,” Minnesota Department of Corrections website, coms.doc.state.mn.us/tourreport/04FacilityInmateProfile.pdf.
“Dear Paper”: This line comes from a 120-page notebook that Naomi titled “My Journal.” Naomi periodically cleaned out her cell at Shakopee and mailed letters, notebooks, drawings, and books to her sister Toma, who kept the items in storage in her house in Chicago. By the time Naomi was released, Toma had transferred all of Naomi’s letters and other writings into three enormous garbage bags. This chapter draws from the contents of two of those bags—the third was hidden under other storage and too hard for Toma to access—which Naomi invited me to read when I met her in Chicago in February 2021.
