Black Americans and the Mental Health Industrial Complex
I am familiar with the terms, Military Industrial Complex (MIC), and Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) but I had not heard of the Mental Health Industrial Complex (MHIC) until I read about it in a PushBlack newsletter that I recently receivedin my enmail.
Both MIC and PIC involve symbiotic relationships between government entities and the private corporations that provide them with goods and services. Companies donate to legislators’ political campaigns or dangle prospects of jobs in the private sector when legislators leave office. In exchange, companies gain access to them hoping to influence their decisions when allocating federal and state dollars (e.g., to continue funding an ongoing military incursion or to build more state prisons.)
MHIC replicates this paradigm.
Leonica Riley Erwin, LMSW defined MHIC as “(an)… interconnected, profit-driven system of institutions, organizations, corporations, and industry that shape how mental health care is delivered – often prioritizing profit, control, and conformity over actual healing. This system is involved in diagnosis, treatment, and management of mental health issues.”
According to the PushBlack article, “At the core is a simple repeatable loop: structural harm becomes individual diagnosis, which then leads to profitable treatment while underlying causes stay intact. Harm created by low wages, unstable housing, and chronic stress gets reframed as a personal condition. That condition is diagnosed, coded, and treated without addressing what caused it.”
A Personal Story
Years ago, when my grandson was diagnosed with schizophrenia at18 years old, doctors immediately prescribed antipsychotics drugs and placed him the psych ward of a public hospital. During his mother’s first visit, she was alarmed to see lethargic and uncommunicative because of his medication.
Since his first hospitalization 26 years ago, he has been admitted to psych units many times, been in and out of prison. Most recently, he spent 10 months in solitary confinement in a state prison. (Under the United Nations’ Nelson Mandela Rule, prolonged isolation exceeding 15 consecutive days is considered “a form of torture” and calls for a complete ban for “… juveniles, pregnant women, and individuals with mental or physical disabilities, whose conditions would be exacerbated by isolation.”)
Psychiatrists nor therapists ever inquired about his upbringing, the social conditions under which he lived, or family history. If practitioners had asked, they would have known that he was struck and dragged by an automobile at age two, which left a burn mark that covers the right side of his face. Could that early head injury have caused brain damage?
MHIC has done nothing to improve my grandson’s mental health or the quality of his life.
A research paper in the Delaware Journal of Public Health, noted, “To date, the research shows that African Americans are over diagnosed with schizophrenia and they are more likely to be treated with antipsychotic medications that can have lasting, negative side effects.”
According to psychotherapist Sammi Timimi: “MHIC combines paternalistic sympathy for victims, whilst disempowering and depoliticizing their suffering. Class consciousness is eroded; profitability is created.”
In a 2019 article for Mad in America, Zenobia Morrill quoted psychologist Eric M. Greene, Ph.D., who recounted an experience with medical bias, “On one unforgettable day, a senior psychiatrist said, in reference to poor (B)lack patients, ‘We should just drop a bomb on this whole community and end their suffering. They are evil and broken. They can’t help themselves. All they do is act like wild animals, and there is no way to help them.’ I was so stunned by the comment….”
Psychiatry and Black Americans
In 1851, Southern physician Samuel A. Cartwright’s labeled enslaved people’s escapes for freedom “drapetomania,”a mental illness. The term exemplifies how psychiatry was used to justify slavery and punish runaways by whipping and mutilation.
Large state hospitalsinstitutionalized Black people under racist assumptions, leading to a long history of neglect, forced labor, and dehumanizing treatment that shaped later psychiatric practice in the region (and the nation).
In May 2026, journalist Briona Lambackwrote about the country’s long history of pathologizing Black distress: “During the 1960s, when Black folks were fighting for civil rights, racist psychiatrists came up with the term ‘protest psychosis.’”
A report published by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), National Affairs Office in 2024, the legacy of “scientific racism” is still prevalent today in the mental health system:
“African Americans receive disproportionately more diagnoses of mental disorders related to disruptive, defiant, and psychotic behavior, such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), schizophrenia, and oppositional defiant disorder (ODD). Blacks are overly prescribed antipsychotic drugs, with Black men more likely to be prescribed excessive doses of them.
African American children are disproportionately diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed stimulant drugs that the FDA warns can lead to abuse, addiction, and overdose. African American children are also disproportionately diagnosed with conduct disorder and oppositional defiant disorder.
Blacks are more likely than Whites to be involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility and more likely to be physically, mechanically, or chemically restrained there and for a longer time.”
MHIC: a billion-dollar, for profit system
MHIC is a multi-billion dollar, for profit system that benefits the biomedical community, mental health practitioners, Big Pharma, and hospital networks despite limited scientific data to show its efficacy as a treatment model.
In 2021, Benedict Carey, veteran New York Times science reporter, wrote: “Science has done little to improve the lives of the millions of people living with persistent mental distress. Almost every measure of our collective mental health – rates of suicide, anxiety, depression, addiction deaths, psychiatric prescription use – went in the wrong direction, even as access to services expanded greatly.”
A better way?
Alternatives to MHIC include de‑medicalizing distress (ask “What happened to you?” rather than “What’s wrong with you?”, avoiding coercion (e.g., restraints or involuntary commitment), and building support through community (e.g. peer-led support groups and mental health clinics in communities,), and responding to crises with non‑police crisis response teams.
Photo by Darina Belonogova (pexels.com)
