Race madness [ :-) ]

The New York Times has an article about this:

Black Americans experience schizophrenia and related disorders at twice the rate of white Americans. It’s a disparity that has parallels in other cultures.

Here's a bit:

As a growing body of research reveals, Black people in the United States suffer the hallucinations and delusions of psychosis — the voices that seem to emanate from outside a person’s head, the visions, the paranoias, the breaks with common reality — at a rate roughly twice that of white people. In Europe, racial disparities regarding psychosis are yet wider. Even after researchers control for socioeconomic factors and address issues of diagnosis, the alarming racial gaps remain.

Studies suggesting a link between minority or outsider status and psychosis run back about a century. A 1932 study looked at hospital admissions for psychosis in Minnesota. It found that Norwegian immigrants were admitted at twice the rate of native Minnesotans or Norwegians in their home country. By the 1970s, researchers were turning specifically to racial divides in psychiatric disorders, and by the 2000s, the relationship between race and psychosis (which appears to outstrip any correlation between race and more common conditions like depression) was becoming well studied in both the United States and Europe. Yet despite the mounting data, in the United States, until recently, the issue was relegated to the edges of mainstream psychiatry — or perhaps beyond the edges.

 The whole thing is pretty odd, as explained in this part (with my bold):

In the United States, Black-white ratios are at least 1.9 to one; some studies show that disparities for nonwhite Hispanics are narrower but still notable. In Europe overall, Black-white differentials hover in the vicinity of four to one. In England, the gap for Black Caribbean and Black African immigrants runs between four to one and more than six to one. In the Netherlands, for Moroccan, Surinamese and Antillean immigrants, the ratio is around three to one.

Among the immigrant groups, one plausible factor is the dislocation and stress that can come with the immigrant journey itself. But while such trauma may seem an obvious trigger, given that many immigrants arrive in their new nations after dangerous journeys and unable to speak the language that surrounds them, researchers have found repeatedly that second-generation immigrants to the United States and Europe develop psychosis at rates at least as high as their parents. Something is happening in the new country.