Drapetomania

Resisting Enslavement as Symptomatic of Mental Disease

In an 1851 report commissioned by the Louisiana State Medical Association, physician Samuel Adolphus Cartwright summarized putative physical characteristics and health conditions of those of African descent in the state. He identified drapetomania as a unique, though vaguely defined, condition, with the key symptom of fleeing from enslavement.

Citing supposed physiological differences and the Christian Old Testament as evidence that people of African descent were destined to obey and serve, Cartwright concluded that drapetomania was a risk whenever masters either treated the enslaved as equals or treated them with cruelty.

Drapetomania could be prevented by beatings, administered if enslaved Africans showed sulkiness or dissatisfaction without obvious cause. Forbidding alcohol, eliminating visits to neighbors at night, and withholding adequate food, shelter, and clothing also were measures taken to prevent drapetomania. According to Cartwright, treating people of African descent like children, using this combination of controls, would reaffirm and support Africans' basically docile and submissive nature and thus effectively cure them from running away. Failure to treat drapetomania adequately might yield another novel disorder identified by Cartwright—dysaesthesia aethiopis—characterized by intellectual dullness, refusal to work, proneness to mischief, and unresponsiveness to punishment from overseers.

Although many rationalized African enslavement with similar arguments, there is no evidence that this proposed diagnosis particularly affected mental health theory or practice of the time. In fact, W. A. Sawyer reports that Cartwright's report generated published skepticism from medical colleagues, who rejected his arguments as being informed more by his politics than by science.

Drapetomania was an alleged disease afflicting enslaved Africans in the antebellum southern United States, causing them to attempt to escape their servile societal station. The term combined the Greek words drapetes (“a runaway slave”) and mania (“madness”). Most contemporary references to this “disease” treat it as a prototypical historical example of racism masquerading as psychological science in clinical practice. Some, however, have cited drapetomania in broader indictments of the entire mental health field.

Contemporary Views

Twentieth-century social scientists typically cite drapetomania as a classic example of racist pseudo-science. Alexander Thomas and Samuel Sillen notably discussed drapetomania as an early point in a long line of medical justifications of dehumanizing treatment of African Americans through genetic deficiency theories and faulty, self-serving epidemiology. [Page 1125]Thomas Szasz, often credited with drawing modern professional attention to drapetomania, argued that Cartwright's racist nosology highlights the general inappropriateness of applying medical analyses to so-called mental problems. Szasz saw psychiatric labels as simply stigmatizing objectionable behavior of socially marginalized people and justifying societal interventions disguised as medical care. While drapetomania is not a widespread view, some recently have used its example to question the validity of diagnoses like oppositional defiant disorder and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder.