Jonathan M. Metzl MD, PhD, is an acclaimed physician and sociologist who speaks, teaches, and writes on a range of topics including mental illness and gun violence, race and whiteness in America, health and healthcare, and diversity and structural competency in higher education.
He is the author of the new, groundbreaking book, What We’ve Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms, a highly-acclaimed book that, by looking at a racially-charged mass shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, reexamines all notions of how we as a nation should address gun violence. This brilliant, piercing analysis shows mass shootings as a symptom of our most unresolved national conflicts. What We’ve Become ultimately sets us on the path of alliance-forging, racial-reckoning, and political power-brokering we must take to put things right.
Dr. Metzl is also the author of Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland. A New York Times bestseller, the book is an in-depth look at why so many working-class white Americans support politicians whose policies are literally killing them. The book was also the winner of the 2020 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and was recently updated with a new afterword.
Dr. Metzl is the Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor of Sociology and Psychiatry, and the director of the Department of Medicine, Health, and Society, at Vanderbilt University. He received his MD from the University of Missouri, MA in humanities/poetics and psychiatric internship/residency from Stanford University, and PhD in American culture from University of Michigan. Among his awards is the 2020 APA Benjamin Rush Award for Scholarship and a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Shaped the American Pandemic Moment
Jonathan Metzl’s award-winning 2019 book, Dying of Whiteness, provided a warning: white Americans were drawn to politicians who pledged to make their lives great again, but whose policies actually placed them at greater risk of illness and death. Racial resentment fueled pro-gun laws in Missouri, caused resistance to the Affordable Care Act in Tennessee, and drove cuts to schools and social services in Kansas. The direct results of these policies? Increasing deaths by gun suicide, rising dropout rates, and falling life expectancies. As Dr. Metzl shows in this talk, rather than mobilizing a course correction, falling life expectancy became the core on which was built an ever-more-expansive political movement during the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to widespread dismantling of public health infrastructure and reinforcement of racial and class hierarchies. This talk ultimately offers a smart and necessary plan for working collectively toward a society that would be healthier for everyone.
Structural Competency: New Medicine for Inequalities That are Making Us Sick
As the US health care system looks to adapt to new, post-pandemic norms, we must begin to address the inequities made even more apparent by the COVID-19 pandemic. How can we reimagine and redesign the health care delivery and education systems through a lens of health equity and racial justice? Dr. Metzl argues that the answer lies with Structural Competency which calls for a new approach to the relationships among race, class, and symptom expression. While many health care professionals, social workers, and public health practitioners have long addressed structural determinants of health, clinical care has been focused on the individual, and often restricts the scope of cultural competency training to the beliefs and behaviors of individual patients. In this keynote, Dr. Metzl underscores how Structural Competency aims to develop a language and set of interventions to reduce health inequalities at the level of neighborhoods, institutions, and policies.
Protest Psychosis: What the Race-Based Overdiagnosis of Schizophrenia in the 1960s Reveals About Today’s CRT Wars
Battles over the role of “race” in education and the structures that uphold racial privilege and inequity burst into the national spotlight in the 2020s. But the origins of the debate, and the politics that undergird it, track back decades, and play out in unexpected ways. In this thought-provoking talk, Dr. Metzl provides an analysis of how, within the sociopolitical context of the 1960s and 1970s, the intersection of race and mental health altered the way that mental illness was diagnosed, understood, and treated in the United States. Once considered a nonthreatening disease that primarily targeted white middle-class women, Metzl provides an historical exploration of how schizophrenia became associated with the perceived hostility, rebellion, mistrust, and violence of Black men during the Civil Rights movement. Part historical case study and part social commentary, Metzl utilizes the complex history of the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ionia, Michigan to showcase the detrimental impact that shifting definitions of schizophrenia had on Black men, and the implications of that history for CRT debates in the present-day.
